- Anthony Douglas Williams
The little bustard is a pheasant sized bird with more than half of its population concentrated
in the Iberian Peninsula (parts of Portugal & Spain)
The little bustard’s original habitat was the Steppe grassland - a semi arid area characterised by stretches of grass and shrub.
These birds along with other grassland species had over the ages adapted to traditional non intensive crop rotation farming. Such farm and pastures are referred to as Pseudo Steppes.
Pseudo Steppes provided the necessary landscape heterogeneity for the species to flourish in terms of amount of surface devoted to cereal farmland and proportion of fallow land.
However agricultural intensification has led to habitat loss due to the following reasons:
1. Female, juvenile and clutch mortality by farm machinery.
2. Reduced food supply during the nest period. (reduced insect population caused by pesticides)
3. Irrigation and conversion of former cereal fields and fallow to intensive crops (vineyards/olive)
4. Industrial and urban development.
Its numbers have now declined dramatically over the last decades, and is now one of Europe’s most threatened species.
Little Bustard
IUCN Conservation Status: NT (Near Threatened)
Sony A77ii
Tamron 150-600
f/6.3, 1/1000s, ISO 800, 600mm
Llieda Steppes, Catalonia, Spain
May 2018