The flight of the florican: An ornithologist’s lifelong quest to save a terrestrial bird

“…With a flash of white and a sharp carrying rattle”, the bird “fluttered off the ground before dropping back to the spot he took off from”. It “did that endearing jump twice more, before hurrying away into the fast descending dusk”.

That’s how ornithologist Ravi Sankaran, in an article published in 1987, described the dramatic courting display of the male lesser florican.

Two years later, the population of this species of bustard had fallen to 750, down from the 4,374 birds that Sankaran and his mentor, veteran scientist Asad Rahmani, had estimated only five years before, in 1982.

Today, the lesser florican is on the brink of extinction – the latest survey by the Wildlife Institute of India in 2017-’18 estimated that as few as 340 birds remain.

During the 20th century, the lesser florican – popularly known in Madhya Pradesh as the kharmor (the “peacock of the grass” in Hindi) – was abundant and conspicuous in dry grasslands all over India, from Uttar Pradesh to Tamil Nadu.

The story of the lesser florican’s decline is equally the story of the untiring efforts by ornithologists such as Sankaran to study and conserve the endangered bird species.

Sankaran’s “first love was floricans”, Rahmani wrote in an obituary after the ornithologist died in 2009. After Sankaran saw the lesser florican in Sailana and the Bengal Florican in Dudhwa for the first time, he was “hooked” to the two species for the rest of his life, wrote Rahmani.

Sankaran’s papers at the Archives, National Centre for Biological Sciences, contain his research notes and correspondence on the lesser florican over several years and show how he was central to efforts to conserve it.

Fourteen years since Sankaran’s death, the imminent extinction of the lesser florican poses a troubling question for conservationists: how did the species come to such a pass despite a good scientific understanding of its ecology and habitat?

Hunting, habitat destruction

Since the early 20th century, the lesser florican’s courtship display has attracted the attention of several naturalists and scientists. During breeding season, the male bird arches its back, ruffles its conspicuously white neck feathers, then leaps up vertically a metre or two above the ground, followed by a controlled descent with partially open wings.

Sankaran calculated that the bird could repeat this display up to 200 times an hour during peak breeding season from June to August. After a successful courtship, the female lesser florican nests in dense grassland, raising its chicks away from the prying eyes of foxes, dogs and humans.

Many naturalists have remarked on the uncanny ability of the lesser florican to arrive with the monsoon rains in western and north-western India, where it stays till nesting is over.

Little is known about the bird’s winter movements, which appear to be largely irregular, British ornithologist Frank Finn noted in Indian Sporting Birds as far back as 1915. What is clear, however, is that the lesser florican requires large, continuous tracts of grasslands and grassland-like habitat, such as fallows, fields and open scrub savannah, to survive. This is likely its Achilles Heel today.

In 1978, ornithologist RS Dharmakumarsinhji wrote that the lesser florican was “seen frequently” in the Wankaner Hills of Gujarat, along with other game birds such as rain quail and partridges, between 1928 and1938. Now, the species is recorded in only a few sites such as Velavadar in Gujarat and Shonkhaliya in Rajasthan.

The extensive hunting of the lesser florican has been one of the major causes of endangerment since the 19th century. British authors wrote of the lesser florican as a preferred game species, since it was easy to target during its leaping display. Finn included it as one of the key sporting birds of India, along with the Common Crane and the Bengal Florican, in his 1915 paper in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Sankaran’s correspondence with bird-lovers in Central India also indicates that hunting the lesser florican was a popular sport till the 1940s.

Large-scale hunting appears to have continued after independence. Dharmakumarsinhji mentions the frequent hunting of the male lesser florican in Gujarat’s Kathiawar district even in the 1960s.

But it was the rapid loss of grassland and fallows all over India that possibly pushed the species into endangerment. By the time Sankaran began his research on the lesser florican in 1985, the species was already restricted to a handful of sites in Eastern Gujarat, Eastern Rajasthan and Western Madhya Pradesh.

Changes in the landscape were evident in the sites Sankaran visited frequently. Based on surveys in the late 1990s, he estimated that 50% of privately owned grasslands that he had visited in 1989 had been lost between 1989 to 1999. Sankaran also identified over-grazing by livestock that had converted large stretches of grasslands to unproductive land by the late 1980s.

His observations give vital clues into how a rare species may be pushed to low numbers when natural and human factors come together. In 1999, Sankaran wrote that the lesser florican was particularly susceptible to drought. Rainfall determined the regrowth of grass every monsoon as well as insect prey. An extended drought from 1985 to 1987, Sankaran wrote, pushed down the bird’s populations drastically and never recovered.

As Sankaran observed, this was due to the natural patchiness in rainfall in this part of India. Even in years of good monsoon, some patches of grasslands may not receive sufficient rain, which is essential for the successful breeding of the lesser florican. Today, with climate change and increasingly erratic weather, the odds are stacked against the lesser florican more than ever before.

Science and conservation

From 1995, Sankaran’s prolific correspondence, research reports and papers reveal a deep concern with conservation issues and a keenness to save the lesser florican in the wild. Sankaran and fellow researchers feared for the bird’s future as early as 1992, writing in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society that they believed, “in all probability, the population has fallen well below levels from which it can recover; that the species is drifting steadily towards extinction”.

Sankaran seems to have had strong faith in science as the basis for effective conservation, particularly in bringing about coexistence. For instance, in a 1990 research paper co-authored with Rahmani, Sankaran attempted to link grassland management and ownership with the likelihood of successful breeding of the lesser florican. This was a time when scientists were just beginning to use their research for the conservation of species and habitats.

Sankaran tried to understand how the birds were able to thrive in the matrix of natural grasslands, used grasslands, fallows and agricultural fields. In a research paper Sankaran presented at a workshop in Baroda in 1994, he advocated for the expansion of grasslands under strict protection coupled with the regulation of free-range grazing in private bheeds and village commons. Sankaran, and the co-authors, suggested “there should be no grazing in grasslands between the first rains of the southwest monsoon and the harvest of grass in November”, after which the hay could be harvested for stall-feeding. They were convinced that such a strategy would benefit both local residents and the lesser florican: the grasslands would be more productive after a breather from grazing and the bird would be able to breed successfully as well.

Sankaran was perhaps the first ornithologist to engage seriously with the people in the landscape, including farmers, forest officers and administrators. He organised workshops with varied stakeholders to devise conservation plans that would be locally acceptable. He tried to persuade farmers to reduce pesticide use in jowar, groundnut and soyabean fields where the lesser florican was found to be breeding.

In the early 1990s, he had also started nurturing a network of local nature-lovers to keep tabs on the arrival dates of male birds and breeding numbers in specific sites. He called this the Florican Watch network. This was perhaps one of the earliest instances of citizen science in India.

At a workshop in Bhopal in 1996, Sankaran spoke about a payment scheme by the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department for local villagers in Sailana and Sardarpur wildlife sanctuaries in return for reporting on the lesser florican and protecting them, which continued for several years.

Some of this work was taken forward by the Bombay Natural History Society after Sankaran’s death.

End game

Since Sankaran died, the lesser florican is on the brink of extinction. In the village of Shonkhaliya in Rajasthan, which lesser floricans still visit during the monsoon, the habitat is not ideal. There, the bird has taken to mounting its courtship displays and breeding in cultivated fields. But pesticides are still used in the fields and vilayati kikar, an invasive tree species, has grown over some of the adjoining grasslands, shrinking the lesser florican’s habitat.

Bird photographers, biologists and birdwatchers continue to flock to the village to witness the lesser florican’s spectacular breeding display. But fewer and fewer birds arrive with the rains each year.

The intriguing leaping display of the male lesser florican had made it an easy target for hunters, just as it has attracted the attention of naturalists since the 1800s. Did the bird’s unique courting display also push scientists like Sankaran into focusing on the breeding grounds at the cost of understanding and challenging the larger socio-ecological issues in Indian grasslands?

From the 1960s, subsistence agriculture transitioned into modern and chemical-intensive farming. Development and agricultural expansion has also sidelined itinerant herders who could possibly coexist with the lesser florican. Grasslands have fragmented due to neglect by the government, which views these as “wasteland”.

The large-scale agrarian and landscape transformation sounded the death-knell for the lesser florican, as it has for pastoralists and marginal farmers.

Sankaran, in his 1987 article, had hoped that preserving grasslands would give a new lease of life “to one of India’s most spectacular birds – the lesser florican – and also all the other creatures that inhabit a grassland”. A quiet end likely awaits the lesser florican, but it is also a tragic failure of science and conservation in countering the larger forces of population decline.

Ghazala Shahabuddin is an ecologist and a Visiting Professor at Environmental Studies, Ashoka University, Sonipat. This article is based on and inspired by Ravi Sankaran’s papers at the Archives, NCBS, Bengaluru.