The flight of the florican: An ornithologist’s lifelong quest to save a terrestrial bird

“…With a flash of white and a sharp carrying rattle”, the bird “fluttered off the ground before dropping back to the spot he took off from”. It “did that endearing jump twice more, before hurrying away into the fast descending dusk”.

That’s how ornithologist Ravi Sankaran, in an article published in 1987, described the dramatic courting display of the male lesser florican.

Two years later, the population of this species of bustard had fallen to 750, down from the 4,374 birds that Sankaran and his mentor, veteran scientist Asad Rahmani, had estimated only five years before, in 1982.

Today, the lesser florican is on the brink of extinction – the latest survey by the Wildlife Institute of India in 2017-’18 estimated that as few as 340 birds remain.

During the 20th century, the lesser florican – popularly known in Madhya Pradesh as the kharmor (the “peacock of the grass” in Hindi) – was abundant and conspicuous in dry grasslands all over India, from Uttar Pradesh to Tamil Nadu.

The story of the lesser florican’s decline is equally the story of the untiring efforts by ornithologists such as Sankaran to study and conserve the endangered bird species.

Sankaran’s “first love was floricans”, Rahmani wrote in an obituary after the ornithologist died in 2009. After Sankaran saw the lesser...

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