You can’t keep a great bustard down (Image: Byung Sun Chun)

THEY may be the heaviest flying animal, but that doesn’t stop great bustards getting around. Satellite tagging shows some migrate 4000 kilometres each year. Their secret? Long layovers.

Male great bustards weigh a whopping 10 to 16 kilograms; females clock in at 5 kilograms. Mimi Kessler of Arizona State University suspected that despite their heft, Mongolian populations travelled great distances to escape harsh winters – January temperatures can drop to -50 °C.

She fitted GPS backpacks to three birds in northern Mongolia, and tracked them for two years. They headed 2000 kilometres south to China’s Shaanxi province in autumn, returning in the spring – twice as far as other bustards migrate (Journal of Avian Biology, doi.org/kxw).


They did it the hard way. Most long-distance migrators soar to conserve energy, but the fat bustards flap their way south. Frequent, lengthy stops may be how they cope, says Kessler. The tagged treks took four months, just 2 to 6 per cent of which was spent in the air. Other migratory birds fly non-stop for days.

This article appeared in print under the headline “You can’t keep a great bustard down”