Arabian Bustard - BirdForum Opus

Photo by peterday
Alidege Plains, Ethiopia, November 2013

Identification

Photo © by birdboybowley
Ali Dege, Ethiopia, 9 October 2017

Male 100 cm; female 75cm

Sandy-brown upperparts, wings and centre tail feathers, finely marked with black
White spots on wings

Arid northwestern Africa to Red Sea and southwestern Arabia.

There are 4 subspecies¹:

A. a. lynesi - Probably extinct; Western Morocco
A. a. stieberi - South-western Mauritania and Senegambia to north-eastern Sudan
A. a. butleri - South Sudan; very rare (resident?) in northwestern Kenya
A. a. arabs - Eritrea, northeastern Ethiopia, Djibouti, and northwestern Somalia; southwestern Saudi Arabia and western Yemen

Grassy plains, bush and savanna.

Their main diet consists of insects, which includes grasshoppers, crickets, locusts, beetles, caterpillars etc.

Clements, J. F., T. S. Schulenberg, M. J. Iliff, D. Roberson, T. A. Fredericks, B. L. Sullivan, and C. L. Wood. 2014. The eBird/Clements checklist of birds of the world: Version 6.9., with updates to August 2014. Downloaded from http://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist/download/
Collar, N., G. M. Kirwan, and E. F. J. Garcia (2020). Arabian Bustard (Ardeotis arabs), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, D. A. Christie, and E. de Juana, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.arabus1.01

BirdForum Opus contributors. (2025) Arabian Bustard. In: BirdForum, the forum for wild birds and birding. Retrieved 6 May 2025 from https://www.birdforum.net/opus/Arabian_Bustard

GSearch checked for 2020 platform.