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 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.