IWN Report — Sunday, 4 October 2026

Two male Great Indian Bustards raised in captivity were released into the wild at Desert National Park in Jaisalmer on Sunday, the start of a release protocol the environment ministry says it will refine as it learns from these birds, for a species whose recovery has been a slow, decade-long effort.

According to the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the Union Environment Minister let the birds go at Sam, inside the national park, with Rajasthan’s forest minister and senior officials looking on. The minister credited nearly a decade of work by scientists and ground staff, and described the Bustard Recovery Programme as a significant shift towards building a viable captive-breeding population and returning the species to its natural habitat.

The PIB release puts the programme’s current stock at 97 birds across its breeding facilities at Sam and Ramdevra, of which 40 came from eggs collected in the wild and 57 were bred in captivity. Eighty-six of them are being kept for breeding and 11 have been set aside for release. Captive breeding produced 24 chicks in 2025 and 29 in 2026.

The programme has also been moving eggs the other way. Under what the PIB calls its Jumpstart approach, eggs from the captive programme were placed in wild nests, and eight chicks hatched from them, six in Rajasthan and two in Gujarat, where IWN reported last month on a separate rescue plan for the state’s few remaining wild bustards.

On the habitat side, Rajasthan’s forest department has built roughly 200 square kilometres of fenced grassland enclosures inside Desert National Park. The PIB says telemetry studies by the Wildlife Institute of India identified those enclosures as key breeding habitat for the birds.

Sources: Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · India Wildlife News