The landcruiser bumped down the rough track past a group of oryx grazing in the cool of the late afternoon. With one hand out of the window Guillaume Gelinaud swung the tall antenna attached to the side of the car, the electronic beeps growing louder in his ear. The houbara bustard was somewhere close ahead. The tone of the beeps shifted as the houbara ran through a dense clump of acacia woodland. Guillaume turned the car off the track to follow the signals sent out by the radio-transmitter carried on the houbara's back. There! Directly ahead, the houbara broke cover, ran across a patch of bare gravel and took to flight, wings flashing black and white in the setting sun. Guillaume stopped the car and got out, bending to the ground to see the houbara's tracks - lobed prints in the soft sandy gravel. Tracing back along their route Guillaume hoped to locate the area in which the bird had been feeding before it was flushed by the car.

Almost immediately Guillaume noticed something unusual. Instead of meandering through an area of low green annual plants, the tracks appeared to come from a broad expanse of bare gravel; certainly no prime houbara feeding ground. The tracks suddenly converged with others, radiating as if from a single source. And there it was; almost invisible in the fading light. A nest. A houbara nest with one egg. For the first time ever a captive-bred released houbara bustard had laid an egg in the wild.

The art and sport of hunting with a falcon spread in the east with the expansion of Islam, and just as peregrines and sakers were the preferred falcons, the houbara bustard was the most sought after quarry. After the 1950s modernization and the advent of truly enormous hunting expeditions began to take their toll on houbara populations in Saudi Arabia. The use of 4 WD vehicles meant hunters could enter even the most remote areas. Bags of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of houbara could not be sustained in a desert ecosystem where breeding often depended on unpredictable spring rains. By the 1980s houbara in Saudi Arabia, as in much of the species range, were becoming scarce as a breeding bird. Clearly, some decisive action was needed to protect and restore dwindling houbara populations.

The Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs, HRH Prince Saud Al Faisal, like many of his fellow countrymen, has a deep interest in the houbara bustard. In recognition that the plight of the houbara reflected the steady deterioration of fragile desert habitats and a parallel decline in a number of native Arabian species, Prince Saud conceived of an organization dedicated to the restoration and preservation of the Kingdom's natural diversity of wildlife. In 1986 the National Commission for Wildlife Conservation and Development was created. Operating under the direction of Professor Abdulaziz Abuzinada, the NCWCD has set out to create and manage a network of protected areas, and has undertaken the restoration of Saudi Arabia's natural biodiversity. For species such as the Arabian oryx, extinct in the wild since the 1970s, the only course of action was a programme of captive-breeding and re-introduction. For the houbara, with remnant populations hanging on in remote areas, the approach was multi-pronged: the protection of large areas surrounding the last remaining breeding grounds for wild houbara; the creation of new reserves in areas known to be important for migrant houbara visiting the Kingdom each winter; the designation of vast no-hunting areas; the formulation of hunting laws to protect breeding houbara; and the captive-breeding and re-introduction of houbara into areas from which they had disappeared.

Today over 20,000 km2 of steppe desert houbara habitat is totally protected from hunting and from grazing by sheep or goats. A further 80,000 km2 or more is protected from hunting of any kind. The Harrat al-Harrah reserve in the far north of Saudi Arabia contains a small but persistent population of resident, breeding houbara. Migrant houbara disperse throughout the Kingdom each winter, finding protection in reserves as far flung as At Taysiyah in the north east to 'Uruq Bani Ma'arid on the edge of the great sand desert the Rub' Al Khali, in the extreme south. But though migrant houbara visit the Kingdom during their winter travels, Saudi Arabia has many areas from which resident breeding houbara have disappeared. The captive breeding and re-introduction programme, based at the NCWCD's National Wildlife Research Centre, near the city of Taif, aims to repopulate some of these empty areas with breeding houbara.

The re-introduction project began with the creation of the NWRC in 1986, when initial brood-stock were collected under license from Pakistan and brought to the breeding unit. The captive-breeders at the NWRC faced a long and difficult road. No one had ever bred houbara successfully in captivity before, and indeed virtually nothing was known about the breeding of houbara in the wild: certainly nothing that could be applied to captive breeding. Even the diet of the captive birds was a matter of experimentation at first. The use of large pens, open aviaries and adjoining enclosures were all tried in an attempt to get fertile eggs through natural breeding. But it was only with the use of artificial insemination techniques that real progress was made, with egg fertility eventually approaching 80 per cent.

The first success came in 1989 when the NWRC produced 17 houbara chicks. Refinement of techniques continued to improve the production of chicks and in 1991 the first trial release of captive-bred houbara took place.

The area chosen for releases was the 2,244 km2 Mahazat as-Sayd protected area, 150 km north-east of Taif. Oral tradition records Mahazat as a former breeding ground for the houbara bustard, so in 1990 the entire reserve was fenced to exclude poachers and grazing livestock. Since 1991 over 120 houbara have been taken from the breeding unit at the NWRC and placed within a 400 ha predator-proof enclosure inside Mahazat. Of these 120, 94 houbara, all fitted with radio transmitters, have been released into the wider reserve; their fate has been monitored closely by a succession of field biologists.

By March 1995, 31 houbara remained in Mahazat, a survival rate of 33 per cent. But this percentage does not tell the whole story. Because releases are trials at this stage, and no one knows the best way to release a captive-bred houbara, a number of different methods have been tried. These range from the release of groups of very young chicks, to the release of adult houbara. By far the greatest problem has come from foxes. Captive-bred houbara basically know nothing about life in the wild when they are first released; they must learn to feed, to shelter and to avoid predators such as the red fox.

The best method of release so far, involves fully-flighted 3-4 month-old houbara. The survival of these birds approaches 50 per cent with losses still occurring to foxes. A combination of predator training and the presence of experienced birds in the reserve may help to reduce these losses. Work underway in 1995 is investigating these possibilities.

So what do we have: houbara have been bred in captivity, they have been released into an area of good habitat, and some of them have survived. Now what? What else needs to happen for the restoration programme to have a chance of re-establishing houbara in the area? The key is self-sustainability of the new population, and to be self-sustaining the released houbara must reproduce.

In 1995, for the first time, the reserve contained houbara of two and three years old-old enough to breed according to the results from the captive breeding unit. As all the houbara in the reserve are being monitored regularly, by car and by light aircraft, particular attention could be paid to females whose lack of movements were consistent with egg-tending behaviour. Despite this close scrutiny things don't always go as planned.

The discovery of the first nest containing one egg, laid by a two year old female, on 19 April was followed soon after with the most exciting find of all. Again while tracking a houbara on May 8, a one year old female not expected to be breeding yet, Guillaume located not one set of tracks, but four - one large and three small. This represented an unprecedented success. Not only was a one year old houbara breeding, but she had managed to produce three chicks.

An egg in the first nest hatched on 22 May, and on the same day a second nest was found, bringing the total number of breeding attempts in 1995 to three. This last nest contained a single egg on 22 May, but when checked three days later a second egg had been laid. The owner of these eggs was a two-year old female - one of the birds expected to be breeding.

These are the first ever nests and chick produced by captive-bred re-introduced houbara bustards, and are the first seen in this part of Saudi Arabia for over 30 years. They represent not the grande finale of the houbara re-introduction programme, but rather signal its start. We can breed houbara in captivity, we can release them into the wild, and there they will survive and eventually breed.

Some questions will remain however. Will these new chicks survive, stay and eventually breed also, perpetuating and expanding the population until further releases of captive-bred houbara are unnecessary? And, can we repeat this success in other areas; areas that also once contained populations of breeding houbara?

In early June I was fortunate enough to see what may have been the first flight of the brood of three chicks. In flying strongly and swiftly away from my noisy car they demonstrated that they had survived; they had found food and avoided foxes, and learnt from their mother all the necessary skills to live in the wild. Although their mother came from an incubator at the NWRC, these fledglings were truly wild birds. The first of a brand new generation of Saudi Arabian houbara bustards, and the `hope for generations to come.

We can breed houbara in captivity, we can release them into the wild, and there they will survive and eventually breed.