On 26 March 2026, a Great Indian Bustard chick hatched in the Naiya grassland of Kutch, Gujarat. It should not have been born there at all.
Gujarat currently has three surviving female Great Indian Bustards in the wild. Their eggs are infertile — there are no breeding males left in the landscape to father them. Without intervention, the GIB in Gujarat was heading toward local extinction as quietly and as certainly as a clock running down.
So conservationists did something audacious. They took a fertile, partially incubated egg from the Sam region of Rajasthan — where India’s largest remaining GIB population survives, around 128 birds — packed it into a portable incubator, and drove it across 770 kilometres over 19 hours to Kutch. They placed it in the nest of a wild female, who incubated the egg and raised the chick as her own. And on 26 March, it hatched.
This is the jumpstart method — a technique that threads the needle between captive breeding and wild parenting, giving a chick the survival advantages of both. The chick grows in its actual habitat, under natural conditions, with a wild mother, while the intervention of science makes its existence possible at all.
By mid-April, the chick had learned to fly.
And then it disappeared.
The bird that vanished
For four or five days after the chick’s first flights — around 18 April — it was not seen. No sightings. No tracks. No sign. Because the chick was too small to be geotagged, there was no way to locate it remotely. Conservationists acknowledged what they could not rule out: that the chick had been taken by a predator, or had drifted beyond the monitoring zone. The honest answer was that they did not know.
Officials have said the disappearance is not entirely mysterious. Once a GIB chick is capable of flight, it enters the open grassland landscape and everything that landscape contains. Raptors. Jackals. Foxes. The vast, unmonitored space of the Kutch grassland. A chick that has never faced any of these things, raised for weeks in a nest that conservationists were watching carefully, suddenly has no such protection. This is what wild means.
Whether the chick survived is not known at the time of writing.
The numbers behind the anxiety
The reason a single chick’s disappearance generates genuine alarm is that the arithmetic of the GIB offers almost no margin for loss. The species is listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. Its range has contracted by roughly 90 percent from its historical distribution, which once covered eleven Indian states as well as parts of Pakistan. Today it survives in fragments: Rajasthan, Gujarat, and vestigial populations in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh.
The total wild population is estimated at between 100 and 150 individuals. Around 82 birds are currently in captive breeding centres at Ramdevra and Sam in Rajasthan, where techniques including artificial incubation, artificial insemination — including a 2024 case where sperm was collected from a male 200 kilometres away — and the jumpstart method have produced slow, painstaking gains. By any measure, these are the last birds. Every individual counts with a weight that makes the word “individual” feel inadequate.
What is killing it
The GIB’s decline is not a mystery. Power line collisions are the single greatest cause of mortality — the bird has poor frontal vision, flies heavily and fast, and has been navigating open desert landscapes for millions of years without overhead obstructions. Overhead transmission lines, which now crisscross the same desert grasslands where renewable energy projects are being built, are effectively invisible to it. The Supreme Court of India has ordered that power lines in GIB habitat be undergrounded; the implementation has been slow, contested by renewable energy companies, and incomplete.
Habitat loss runs parallel to this. India’s grasslands — the GIB’s entire world — are systematically misclassified as wasteland in government records, making them available for diversion to agriculture, solar parks, industrial projects, and mining. The GIB has no forest to retreat to. When the grassland goes, the bird goes with it. This is the same structural failure driving the pressure on blackbucks, chinkara, and every other open-country species in India — the legal and political apparatus that protects forests has no equivalent protecting grasslands.
What the jumpstart means
The Kutch hatching, regardless of what happened to that chick, proved something important: Gujarat’s grasslands can still support GIB breeding. The habitat is not entirely gone. The female’s instinct to incubate and raise is intact. The jumpstart method works — in the sense that it can produce a living, flying bird where the natural conditions for reproduction no longer exist.
What it cannot do is substitute for the harder work: undergrounding power lines, locking grassland habitat against diversion, building a wild population large enough that a single chick’s fate does not carry the weight of the species.
The chick that flew from Kutch’s Naiya grassland in mid-April is, or was, one of perhaps 150 wild Great Indian Bustards left in the world. Scientists, forest officials, and conservationists in two states spent months making its existence possible. They watched it hatch, watched it grow, watched it take its first flight. And then the grassland opened up and took it in, and they could only wait to see what came back.
That waiting — that gap between what science can engineer and what the wild will allow — is the truest picture of where the GIB stands today.
Sources: Down to Earth · Open Magazine · ScienceDirect — GIB Genetic Diversity · IUCN Red List