The Science of Birds - Random Bird Thursday: A Fatally Fearless Bird That Seems to Swallow Basketballs

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

In each Random Bird Thursday (RBT) episode, the goal is to highlight a bird species that probably isn't going to get featured in a full-length podcast episode. These are birds we might overlook, even though they certainly deserve some appreciation and attention. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~⚠️ SPOILER ALERT!The featured species in this episode is the Arabian Bustard (Aredotis arabs).Support the show

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. And in case you didn't know, it's Random Bird Thursday. In this relatively short, mostly unscripted episode, I'll be spotlighting a bird species that probably isn't going to be featured in one of my full-length episodes. There are over 11,000 bird species in the world, and random bird Thursday is our chance to

celebrate one species that we might otherwise overlook. So which species are we talking about today? Well, to find out, we have to push the random bird selector button. So here we go. Okay, very cool. We have the Arabian Bustard, Ardeotus Arabs, the Arabian Bustard, a large, elegant bird that is very cool. So this will be fun to talk about. and let's just dive right on in.

So the Arabian Bustard, what does this thing look like? Well, if you don't know what a Bustard is, from a distance you might think it's something like a small ostrich or a Rhea or another one of those large flightless birds because it is very big. It's got long, powerful legs But Bustards can actually fly They're not closely related to those other flightless birds

It has a long neck And a medium-length pointy bill The male of this species is larger than the female And he's about 40 inches long from beak to tail Or 100 centimeters And he's pretty heavy Can be 12.5 to 22 pounds Which is 5.7 to 10 kilograms

Now, in fact, this bird is so big and so heavy, and yet it can fly, so it's actually one of the largest flying birds in the world. Not the largest, but one of them. The true record holder for that would be the Corey Bustard, which is a close relative of the Arabian Bustard, the one we're talking about today. The wings of the Arabian Bustard are long and broad, and they have those fingered wingtips in flight. Now, as I mentioned, males are substantially larger than females, sometimes 30% longer and sometimes more than twice the weight of the female. Females just are generally smaller and slimmer than males. The plumage pattern is primarily what we would call cryptic, camouflaged. The head and neck are gray with lots of

real fine little barring that's really, really pretty when you see it up close. The back is a soft brown color and the wing coverts on the back are brown but they have white tips so that gives a spotting effect on the back. The breast and belly are bright white and on the head there's some black markings so there's a black line that extends out behind the eye and that meets a couple of black lines on the crown and all of that makes a little black crest out the back of the head that sticks out the back. The eyebrow area, the supercilium, is relatively white or pale. So some nice markings on the head, those nice spots on the back. So when you look up close, it's actually quite an elegant, beautiful bird. The eyes are yellow, as are the legs, and the bill

color is yellowish gray. So there is sexual dimorphism in that the males are bigger than the females, but there's not a whole lot of sexual dichromatism, right? That's a That's referring to the color. Both sexes look pretty similar, although females may be a little bit more gray above than brown. So this large, powerful bird with long legs, you would imagine it has some kind of amazing loud voice, right? Well, it doesn't.

Not really. These birds are not very vocal. Now, if you cause this bird to flush, like let's say you jump out from behind a bush and go, surprise! Then the bird is going to be annoyed and fly away and maybe make a low-pitched kind of growling note, just kind of protesting the fact that you exist

and that you're so annoying. You often see these birds in pairs, or they might even be in small, loose groups. And an Arabian Bustard walks steadily on its strong legs and its large toes, just casually walking around and pecking for food as it goes. The bird exudes an air of confidence, like it's not in a hurry to get anywhere, It knows what it's doing.

It just wants to be left alone to do its thing. Like most bustards, which are all generally pretty big, beefy birds, the Arabian bustard prefers to run or walk rather than to fly. Being such a heavy bird, it takes a lot of energy to get off the ground, so maybe that's not surprising. Now, I mentioned that these birds seem to be confident, and some have actually described them as having a fatal fearlessness when it comes to humans. In some parts of their range, in Africa and the Middle East, and we'll get to that in a moment,

these birds can seem pretty happy and relaxed, even very close to people, where people live or people in cars or just walking around. The birds just don't seem to be all that concerned with people. And unfortunately, this fatal fearlessness might be what has contributed to their population losses in parts of the world where people have hunted them. People have unfortunately taken advantage of that fearlessness and just walked up and killed these busters. But we'll get to conservation in just a moment. First, let's talk about the bird's family, the distribution habitat, all that good stuff. But first, let's look at etymology, the name, let's break down the name, as we often do. So the genus is Ardeotis, A-R-D-E-O-T-I-S.

and that is a portmanteau of the words Ardea and Otis. Ardea is the genus for Heron, and Otis is the genus of other busters, some other busters, like the Great Bustard. So you take Ardea and you smash it together with Otis and you get Ardeotis a portmanteau. And that's what a portmanteau is, right? You combine a couple words. It's really fun. In fact, you are experiencing a portmanteau right now. podcast is a portmanteau you take ipod remember those iPods no and you take that and you combine it with broadcast and you get podcast other fun portmanteaus are ginormous which is gigantic plus enormous hangary hungry and angry spork spoon and fork and of course shark nato which needs no explanation so the genus is artiotis the family if we go up one taxonomic level, the family is Otidity, O-T-I-D-I-D-A-E, the family of bustards, which of course we will be talking about at length in some future episode. There are 26 bustard species in the world.

The genus Ardaeotis has four species. There's the one we're talking about today, the Arabian Bustard, as well as the Australian Bustard, Corey Bustard, and the Great Indian Bustard. and as I mentioned, the Arabian and Quarry Bustard are each other's closest relative. Now, looking at the distribution on the globe, the Arabian Bustard has a vast range across Africa's Sahel Sahel, S-A-H-E-L. That's the arid region that's south of the Sahara Desert, running in a band from west to east. So these birds live as far west as West Africa, all the way over to the Red Sea, and even on to the Arabian Peninsula. It has been recorded in 24 countries.

But sadly, it is now extinct in Morocco and Saudi Arabia and near-extinct in other countries like Senegal, Nigeria, and Yemen. There's a lot we don't know about where these birds still might be persisting or where they're lost. And just in general, this bird, there's a lot more we could learn about it. Across this large range, these birds inhabit a pretty wide variety of dry habitats, ranging from open semi-deserts to acacia woodlands to savannahs, grasslands, sometimes agricultural areas. Arabian bustards are often seen far from any water source, so you might think that maybe they don't need to drink so much,

but when water is available, they do seem to drink frequently and wholeheartedly. Arabian bustards are not true long-distance migrants, but they do make seasonal movements, and those movements seem to be tied to the rain. When an area gets a bunch of rain, the birds will often move in, maybe to breed, because that area is going to green up after all that rain. There's going to be a lot more food available in terms of invertebrates, and so these birds kind of follow those weather patterns around, which change from year to year, of course. but in general they're going to be moving north around June and then south in October after they breed

some populations or some individuals are more migratory others are resident and just hang out in the same place more or less all year long so one way ornithologists might describe this species is as a partial intra-African migrant right it's the entire species doesn't necessarily migrate it's only going to migrate within Africa, intra-African migrant. Okay, so now it's time to talk about conservation. The IUCN Red List has this bird in the near-threatened category. It's had that status since 2012, and that's based on the fact that the population has been declining 20 to 30% over the last three generations, or at least up to 2015.

12. And these are long-lived birds with a generation length of maybe 15.6 years. So the population is declining overall, but we know, as I already mentioned, there are local extirpations or extinctions that have happened, like in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. So what are the threats to this bird? Well, the list is rather long. Their decline has been going on for a long time, like the last 125 years at least. One of the major problems is hunting. Hunting for sport or food or trade.

That's probably what wiped them out in Saudi Arabia, maybe Morocco. It's a big bird. It makes an attractive target if you're the kind of person that likes to shoot birds, I guess. And remember, it's got that fearlessness. So at least in some cases the bird was an easy

target, and it didn't run away when it was approached by a hunter with a gun. Now, today, after all that hunting, there are plenty of places where these birds are much more wary because they learned to fear humans. Those populations have faced hunters, so they learned the hard way. There's also a trade in live birds from Yemen to Saudi Arabia. Some people in those areas will keep these birds as pets, or they'll use them in falcon training. So they use these as targets for their falcons to kill.

Another threat is that these birds are in some places, in many countries, still used as African traditional medicine. And they come into conflict with people because of livestock proliferation, agricultural expansion, just habitat destruction in general, the usual problem, people, you know, human populations expanding, taking over habitat. And then, of course, we have the ever-present climate change, which has been leading to prolonged droughts that have damaged habitats, causing desertification. These aren't necessarily true desert birds, so, but there is this phenomenon of semi-arid habitats drying out because

of climate change becoming true deserts, and so that is a loss of habitat. And as the temperatures warm in that part of the world, many of the places this bird has lived will become perhaps intolerable. And one more thread that I didn't mention has to do with what these birds eat, which is what we'll talk about now, they eat a lot of grasshoppers, and grasshoppers being sometimes agricultural pests, there's a lot of pesticides

that are applied to reduce grasshopper populations, and that is going to affect the Arabian busters. But yeah, these birds eat a lot of grasshoppers. They eat locusts, particularly when they are swarming. They'll also eat beetles, crickets,

caterpillars. Also, small vertebrates sometimes end up in the gullet of a Arabian bustard, things like little reptiles, young birds, rodents, garden gnomes. And these birds also eat some plant material, like seeds, the fruit from a variety of different kinds of trees, succulent parts of plants, and even the gum or the sap from acacia. So as we were talking about, these birds just kind of walk slowly around, scanning the environment for any of these food items, and because they spend so much time walking around on those

long, powerful legs, we would describe this species as a cursorial bird. C-U-R-S-O-R-I-A-L. Cursorial. That means having limbs that are adapted for running. Arabian Bustards spend long periods each day, maybe up to two-thirds of their day, walking around foraging. They do a lot of that in the early morning and the late afternoon. If you were curious about seeing some photos of Arabian Bustards online, and you look them up, Probably right away you're going to see some photos with these bright red birds perched on the back of Arabian Bustards. And what those are are Northern Carmine bee-eaters, Mirops Nubicus.

They're beautiful birds, very colorful. And so it's, yeah, very common to see these birds riding around on the back of the busters. The busters don't seem to care. And these northern carmine bee-eaters are not super picky, so you also see them riding around on other busters like the Corey Bustard, but they'll also ride around on the backs of sheep, goats, cattle, zebra, camels, giraffes, all kinds of stuff. So it's a pretty cute situation and you have to ask what's going on there. This is what biologists would call a commensal relationship, C-O-M-M-E-N-S-A-L. In a commensal relationship, you have one species that is benefiting from

another species, and that second species is not being harmed or really affected in any way. So in the case of the bee eaters, the bee eaters benefit because they're using the larger bird as a mobile perch for hunting insects. As the buster walks around, it might stir up insects from the grass, and the bee eaters can then swoop in to pick up those insects, anything that the buster misses. And by riding around on the buster, it's not hurting the buster at all, so it's a commensal relationship, as opposed to something like a parasitic relationship where one species is actually doing harm to another.

So this strategy of riding around on bigger animals must work pretty well for the bee-eaters because multiple bee-eater species do this across Africa and, again, they ride around on the backs of lots of large animals. I'm not sure why I think this, but maybe because of the bee-eaters riding on the back of the bustard, but I picture the Bustards as kind of being like these ships and they're just kind of drifting around on an ocean of grassland

because they're moving kind of slow and deliberately and they're just again confident and elegant and then you've got these little passengers riding around on their backs so I don't know I just think of Bustards as like an avian ship I don't know I don't know how to put it maybe that's just me breeding let's talk about breeding now there's not a lot of information about this species with regard to breeding not that i could find i think they're probably monogamous but from what i understand the incubation is carried out primarily by the female and that in the wild you typically would see females with

chicks or young subadults, but I'm not sure that you necessarily see dad walking around with the family. So if they're monogamous, I'm not sure how far that monogamy goes in terms of parental care. We'll do a full episode on Bustards at some point, and we can talk about the generalities of breeding in that family. What I can tell you is that in this genus, Ardeotis, the males are known for having these distinctive balloon-type courtship displays they make, so they can inflate their throat and the feathers of the throat are fluffed up and spread out and it makes this kind of giant white puffball effect. It looks like the bird tried to swallow a basketball and it's having a hard time with it. And remember I said earlier these birds don't make much sound,

but during this display with this ballooned up neck, the bird may make a sort of rasping or low-pitched growling note during the display. So with his sexy choking on a basketball puffball display. The male, presumably at some point, impresses a female, and the two pair up, mate, and then the result is you get one to two eggs. That's the typical clutch size. And those are deposited in a nest, which is really nothing more than a shallow scrape, sometimes lined with a little vegetation. So yeah, the chicks hatch, I guess mom takes care of them, maybe exclusively, hard to say, and the birds grow up to go out and face all the many threats that the Arabian mustard faces. And hopefully live a long time because these birds in general have

fairly long lives. Again, the generation length is estimated at 15.6 years. So maybe we're talking a lifespan of 20, 30 years, but I'm just kind of making that up. I'm not sure. But definitely more than a few years. So there you go. The Arabian Bustard. Ardeotis Arabs, one of the heaviest flying birds in the world. It loves to eat grasshoppers, it's sometimes fearless to a fault, has a weird puffball courtship display, and provides great public transportation to carmine bee eaters, those little freeloaders. It's a really cool bird, the Arabian Bustard, and I hope that there is an opportunity for it to survive in the face of all those many threats

so that you and me can go out and appreciate the birds and they can keep doing what they do being integral parts of their ecosystems in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. All right, we did it. Random Bird Thursday. I hope you enjoyed this little episode.

I certainly enjoyed talking about this really cool bird. It's not one I've seen. I've seen a few other Bustard species and it's always exciting to see them. And yeah, I look forward to talking about Bustards in general in a future episode. But for today, that's what we got, and I'll talk to you next time. Cheers.