Can the little bustard survive intensive farming in Europe?
Flowery steppe and traditional farmland suit the little bustard best. Can this charismatic bird and its quirky breeding system survive Europe’s rush to intensive agriculture? James Lowen reports.
Evening has softened the light caressing the grassy plains of Lleida in north-east Spain. It has also intensified a violent struggle. Within a few steps of Catalan photographer Òscar Domínguez, two young, hormone-fuelled male little bustards are furiously contesting rights to a display ground, ownership of which governs their rank in a social hierarchy that will determine their chances of procreation.
With such high stakes, the pheasant-sized birds are in no mood to compromise. The rivals viciously stab at one another’s eyes with sharply pointed bills. Blood flows freely for half an hour until the weaker male concedes defeat, accepting his subordinate slot in the pecking order.
But shocking though Òscar found the brutal encounter, he has a greater worry. “I’m afraid that these amazing birds won’t survive at Lleida, given the craze for intensive agriculture.” Òscar is not alone. Across Iberia and beyond – little bustards are found as far east as Kazakhstan and China – ornithologists are diligently unfurling the species’ complex ecological requirements. Understanding exactly what makes these birds tick is crucial for their conservation.
It’s now a race against time. For centuries the western Mediterranean’s stony ‘pseudo-steppes’ (see box, p66) have been gently cultivated: weedy meadows flourishing alongside cereal fields, almond groves and lightly grazed pastures. Birds such as little and great bustards, Montagu’s harriers and calandra larks have had ample time to adjust to this gradually evolving land-use. But such benign co-existence is no more, due to a radical shift in agricultural philosophy.
POPULATIONS UNDER PRESSURE
Spain and Portugal still harbour 60 per cent of the world’s remaining little bustards, yet some of their populations are plummeting. “In Catalonia numbers have halved in the last 12 years,” says Santi Mañosa of Barcelona University. Manuel Morales, his colleague at the Autonomous University of Madrid, can sadly top this. “In Extremadura the crash is 75 per cent over 10 years,” Manuel says.
The battle of the bustard is also underway across the Pyrenees. French conservationists are fighting to save a population that has slumped 90 per cent over 25 years – one of the steepest declines on record for a European bird.
Santi, Manuel and their co-researchers soon found that the bustards’ breeding success is very poor – on average
TWO YOUNG BUSTARDS ARE FURIOUSLY CONTESTING A DISPLAY GROUND. BLOOD FLOWS FOR HALF AN HOUR.
HIGH FLIERS
Males of bird species found at low densities in grassland, desert or open plains face a conundrum. How do you attract a mate when your nearest partner may well be several kilometres away? Even short vegetation can hide birds, especially if there is heat haze.
One answer is to extravagantly broadcast your song by taking to the air. Hence the song-flight – often repeated circles or circuits – of many larks, pipits, finches and related birds. Other species perform their entire courtship in mid-air. For example, the European roller has a tumbling, lapwing-like display – turning into a neon-blue shock of feathers visible from afar – while the male little bustard puts on his leaping performance.
Several other small bustard species from Africa and southern Asia use aerial courtship displays. In northern India and Nepal, the male lesser florican hurls himself 2m into the air, flapping his wings hard to create a far-carrying rattling sound, before parachuting groundwards. He may repeat this display over 500 times a day. just one female in four raises even a single chick each year. The challenge has been to work out why, and to isolate which farming practices are causing the most problems.
Little bustards are long-necked, stocky birds with strong legs for trotting across arid steppe. They eat a wide range of insects and seeds, and both sexes have fine brown vermiculations to melt into their habitat and avoid predators. But cryptic plumage hardly helps males and females find one another.
To counteract this, the males have evolved a stunning display. A male will inflate his black-and-white neck feathering into a cobra-like ruff, stomp his feet, throw back his head to give a call reminiscent of raspberry-blowing or a loud fart, and leap into the air to flash largely white wings. “Males mainly dance in the first two hours after dawn,” says Òscar, who has photographed them for the past four springs. “They always face the sun. It’s as if they’re welcoming each new morning.”
Little bustards display communally – a courtship system called lekking. However, their leks differ from the compact leks of black grouse, capercaillie and ruffs. “These bustards have what is known as an ‘exploded’ lek,” explains Manuel. “There is a loose gathering of displaying males spread through the grassland. Females move among them to select the best dancer.” Each female picks Mr Right, mates and promptly leaves to raise her young alone; males contribute only their genes.
This may seem an easy game for males, but appearances are deceptive. Only 10 per cent of male little bustards ever
mate. In purely demographic terms, the remaining 90 per cent of males are effectively superfluous, their lives barren.
Grasping this is critical to any conservation strategy. “The number of females is key,” says Santi. “The bustards winter in mixed-sex groups, so we take photos of the flocks to establish the gender ratio. We need to know if females are more likely than males to die prematurely, and if so why.”
Santi’s research focuses on understanding the females’ ecological requirements. Ornithologists have long known that males prefer shorter vegetation for displaying, but have only recently determined that females need cover of different heights: tall vegetation for shelter from predators, plus shorter patches from which to keep a lookout. They also need insect-rich areas to feed young. “A chick can munch 200 grasshoppers daily,” says Alexandre Villers, an ecologist studying little bustards in France.
The researchers have identified several ways in which agricultural intensification is making the Iberian pseudosteppes less bustard-friendly. First, irrigation is enabling Tucked away in the rain shadow below mountains to the north and south, Iberia’s pseudo-steppes are arid, treeless plains with cold winters and hot summers. Here the stony ground supports grasslands with diverse plant communities that are rich in insect life – and therefore in insectivorous birds, from Montagu’s harriers to rollers. This fragile landscape is seminatural, having been modified for centuries by cultivation and grazing by livestock, so is known as ‘pseudo-steppe’. Yet it is still highly vulnerable to rapid land-use change: little wonder that today these plains hold one of the highest proportions of declining ‘priority’ bird species in Europe. farmers to grow large areas of new crops such as olives that provide no habitat for steppe birds. For Santi, monoculture of any kind is a disaster. “It destroys habitat heterogeneity – the variety that bustards need.”
Second, the relentless drive to maximise profits by using all available land means that weedy field margins and insect-rich fallow fields are going under the plough.
Third, there is the conversion of cereals to varieties that are harvested early. Bustard eggs and chicks are crushed by combine harvesters, while those that survive later starve due to a lack of invertebrate ‘pests’ as food. “Cereal fields have become ecological traps for bustards,” says Yoav Perlman of the University of East Anglia, who has also been studying the bustards’ worrying decline.
Finally, Santi fingers the disappearance of free-ranging livestock, whose moderate grazing traditionally prevented scrub from encroaching on grassy regions in places such as Catalonia’s Lleida Plains. Huge areas there are now devoid of cattle. To the south in Extremadura, Yoav notes the opposite problem: overgrazing. “Farmers pile on ever more livestock, razing the grassland,” he says. “And all because the EU is subsidising the production of cheese.”
TURNING BACK THE CLOCK
The nub of the problem is how European governments choose to implement the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and subsidise their farmers. “Government policies are promoting industrial farming, instead of local
FEMALE LITTLE BUSTARDS NEED COVER OF DIFFERENT HEIGHTS: TALL VEGETATION FOR SHELTER, PLUS SHORT PATCHES TO KEEP LOOKOUT.
production that diversifies rural economies,” Santi says. Manuel Morales agrees: “Spain and Portugal are playing agricultural catch-up with the European countries where intensification occurred decades earlier.”
The impact on the Lleida Plains has been profound – 10 per cent of the pseudo-steppe landscape has been lost in the last five years alone. “In the past the farmed landscapes here were far more diverse,” Santi explains. “Nowadays fallow fields and set-aside are vanishing, flowery field margins have all but disappeared and cereal monoculture predominates.”
So what is the solution? “Modern, subsidies-driven agriculture and little bustards are increasingly simply incompatible,” argues Cesc Cuscó, who also works at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “There is nothing else for it but to turn the clock back somehow.”
Boris Barov of BirdLife International concurs with this daunting analysis: “The secret to helping little bustards is to stop the rush towards intensive-farming practices.” Encouragingly, Boris points out that the CAP itself offers the potential to do this, through its agri-environment schemes that compensate farmers.
In France and Portugal, conservationists have already demonstrated that agri-environment schemes can reduce nest-destruction rates in little bustards and boost chick survival. Their solution is strikingly simple: counteract problems created by early-harvest cereals by paying farmers to delay sowing. Growers still get their crop – albeit later – plus a cash bonus for helping bustards.
Change is also afoot on Spain’s Lleida Plains, where farmers in EU-designated Special Protection Areas receive compensation for leaving fields uncultivated. This suits bustards down to the sun-baked ground.
Santi is delighted. “At last we’re showcasing sensible, cost-effective interventions that prove farming and little bustard conservation can be compatible.” Now we just have to build on this start, agrees Manuel. “There has to be co-ordinated action on a much larger scale,” he says. “After all, conserving set-aside fields for the bustards also helps other declining, fallow-dependent species such as the stone curlew and calandra lark. Little bustards could become icons of steppe conservation in Europe.”
The question now, says Manuel, is whether greening measures contained in the reformed CAP will turn out to be positive. Success would remove any future need for ‘last ditch’ emergency measures, such as the reintroduction of little bustards to Poitou-Charentes in south-west France. Faced with the prospect of the bustards’ extinction in this part of their range, French conservationist Carole Attie and colleagues have over the past decade supplemented the local resident population with 245 captive-bred birds. These now form about 12 per cent of the male population.
Back on the Catalan steppes, Òscar Domínguez has just spent his 100th spring day photographing displaying little bustards and shadowing Santi Mañosa’s team. Òscar reminisces about the most special moment so far. “It was late evening. Back-lit by the sun’s ebbing rays, surrounded by swaths of fiery poppies, a male bustard walked right up to my hide, paused and posed beautifully. Encounters like that stay with you forever.”