Little bustard | Tetrax tetrax

Voice

The male displays from a bare scrape trodden out within the crop. He stands tall, inflates the black-and-white neck, throws the head back and every ten to twenty seconds delivers a short, dry, snorting prrt, like someone blowing through pursed lips. This is often followed by a leap of a metre or more with a brief burst of wingbeats producing a whistled sisisisi. In flight the male's narrowed outer primaries generate a sustained purring whistle that on still mornings carries further than the call itself, and it is often the first sign of the bird.

Identification

The breeding male has a slate-grey face and a black neck crossed by two clean white bands, the upper a narrow V beneath the throat, the lower a broad collar. Back and coverts are ochre with fine black vermiculation, underparts pure white. Females and winter males lack the neck pattern and are entirely ochre, streaked and barred, with a finely streaked neck. In flight the wing looks strikingly white with only the primary tips black; flight is fast and low on stiff, shallow beats.

Confusion species

On the ground a female or juvenile suggests a large hen pheasant or even a partridge, but the neck is longer, the head smaller and rounder and the legs long and yellow. In flight the almost wholly white wing is diagnostic: no gamebird shows that. Great bustard is four times the weight and has a black trailing edge to the wing.

Habitat

Extensive dry arable with plenty of fallow, alfalfa, vetch and sainfoin, and dry steppe grassland with a low, open structure. Males choose display sites with short cover and clear sightlines; females nest in taller vegetation a few hundred metres away. Outside the breeding season birds flock on stubbles and green cover crops.

Range and movements

Breeds from Iberia and southern France east to Kazakhstan; in Europe lost from Hungary, Germany and almost all of Italy. The centre of gravity lies in Iberia — Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid and Extremadura, with smaller strongholds in Castilla y León, Andalusia, the dry farmland of Lleida and the Ebro valley between Belchite and the Monegros — but the decline is steep: from some 127,000 birds in 2005 to some 53,000 in 2016, with a sex ratio ever more skewed towards males. In north-west Europe a very rare vagrant, mostly in late autumn and winter on coastal fields, and every record raises the question whether the bird is wild or traces back to released or escaped stock.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

How and when to look

The Crau near Saint-Martin-de-Crau in Provence, the dry farmland of Lleida or the country around Belchite in the Ebro valley: from mid-April into May the males call across the stony plain and the cereal fields and can be heard from public tracks. Be there before sunrise, because calling stops within a couple of hours and after that you get flushing birds and nothing else. Locate the male first by the snorting call and then with the telescope by the white neck patch: the jump repeats every few minutes and lasts under two seconds.

Conservation status

Near Threatened globally and falling sharply in the western population. Arable intensification is the cause: loss of fallow and fodder legumes, field enlargement, irrigation and insecticides that remove the invertebrate food chicks depend on. In France parts of the population survive only on agri-environment agreements and restocking, and those local birds go back on released stock.

Scientific name

Tetrax tetrax | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Otis tetrax; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Tetrax was introduced in 1817 by Forster. Tetrax is the Latin tetrax, the name of an unidentified gamebird. The specific name repeats the genus name. The specimen the first description was based on came from France.