Bustards are grassland giants from forty to 150 centimeters
Bustards—including floricans and korhaans—are hefty ground birds of dry grassland and steppe, spanning about 40 to 150 centimeters in length. Twenty-six living species eat leaves, seeds, fruit, small vertebrates and invertebrates as opportunistic omnivores across open country.
English borrowed the name from Old French bistarda, a cousin of Portuguese and Galician abetarda and Spanish avutarda, all applied to the great bustard. By 1544 the naturalist William Turner was already writing both "bustard" and "bistard." Every one of these forms traces back to Pliny the Elder's Latin avis tarda, later repeated by Pierre Belon in 1555 and Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1600. Tardus meant slow and deliberate, a neat description of the unhurried gait these birds show as they stride across open ground. The Indian name florican is murkier: Thomas Jerdon guessed in 1862 at a link with Flanderkin or Flercher, but the Hobson-Jobson dictionary argued he had misread Latham and that Flercher was simply a clerk's slip.
Scientific naming came in two steps. Linnaeus gave the great bustard the genus Otis, from a Greek word for the bird, in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae in 1758, and Constantine Rafinesque coined the family name, first as Otidia, in 1815. Genetic dating puts the group's origin roughly 30 million years back in southern or eastern Africa, with later spread into Eurasia and Australia.
Size is the headline trait. The kori bustard and the great bustard are routinely named as the heaviest birds able to fly; big males top 20 kilograms, average about 13.5, and reach 150 centimeters. At the other extreme the little brown bustard stands around 40 centimeters and weighs near 600 grams. Males usually dwarf females, often a third longer and sometimes double the weight, making this one of the most lopsided bird families, though among floricans the hens are slightly bigger. Each wing carries 10 primaries and 16 to 24 secondaries, the tail 18 to 20 feathers, and the plumage mostly serves as camouflage.
Bustards stride on sturdy legs, pecking as they walk, and would rather run than fly, though their broad wings end in fingered tips. Males court by puffing out throat sacs or raising crests, and the hen alone incubates three to five speckled eggs in a ground scrape, where predators take a heavy toll. Flocks form outside the breeding season, yet most species are shrinking through hunting and habitat loss. Britain once had them in numbers on Salisbury Plain; by 1819 a male flushed by a dog on Newmarket Heath fetched five guineas at Leadenhall Market, the last native bird died around 1832, and chicks imported from Russia produced the first British-hatched young in over 170 years in 2009.
Source: Bustard
