Saving the Bird, Losing the Grassland: When Flagship Conservation Becomes a Substitute for Landscapes

The Bird and the Grassland: Which One Are We Saving?

The tension India can now breed the Great Indian Bustard in captivity: the conservation plan holds 97 birds, 57 of them captive-bred.

That is a real achievement for a species that fell from about 1,260 birds in 1969 to around 120 today. Yet the grasslands where the bustard must eventually survive keep shrinking and the less famous species that share them are disappearing with far less attention. The question is whether flagship species are the best way to save ecosystems or a comfortable substitute for doing so.

The case for flagship species Conservation needs attention, money and political will and charismatic species attract all three.

Very few people will campaign for a dry grassland, but many will campaign for the Godawan.

• Flagships create a constituency. The bustard has its own cultural identity in Rajasthan, its own litigation in the Supreme Court and its own breeding centres. No skylark has any of these.
• Flagships can work as umbrellas. Protecting the habitat a bustard needs also protects the grassland and its smaller species. Project Tiger protected whole forests in the name of one animal.
• Captive breeding buys time. With about 120 birds left, waiting for a perfect landscape policy would have meant extinction. The 29 chicks bred this year are an insurance policy that did not exist a decade ago.

The case for landscapes The opposing argument is equally strong.

A bird bred in an enclosure is released into the same landscape that killed its wild relatives.

• The bustard's decline came from its habitat, not from a shortage of birds. Grasslands were long dismissed as "wastelands" and converted to irrigated, pesticide-heavy fields, roads and, more recently, power corridors where heavy, low-flying bustards collide with lines.
• Common species are collapsing without notice. The State of India's Birds 2023 records an 80% fall in the Oriental Skylark and a 30% fall in the Indian Roller over 12 years. Nobody holds a release ceremony for them.
• Islands overflow. Lions confined to Saurashtra stray into villages and elephants confined to protected areas spill into farms. A population that thrives inside walls eventually meets the people outside them.
• The courts are already managing trade-offs line by line. In the M.K. Ranjitsinh case, the Supreme Court first ordered power lines in priority bustard habitat to go underground in 2021, then narrowed the order in 2024 after renewable energy firms objected. A landscape plan would have settled in advance where solar parks belong.

Where this leaves us TAN's position is that flagship species should be the instrument of conservation and landscapes its unit. The bustard's popularity is valuable, but only if it is converted into protection for the grasslands it lives in. In practice, success should be measured by grassland secured and by trends in common birds within bustard landscapes, not only by chicks hatched. Grasslands should stop being recorded as wasteland and renewable energy siting should be planned at the landscape level rather than contested in court one transmission line at a time. We would change our view if evidence showed that flagship spending already protects the wider landscape, for example if skylark and roller numbers were holding steady inside bustard priority areas. The evidence so far suggests the opposite.