Great Indian Bustard birth in Gujarat after a decade, with egg transported via halt-free 770 km corridor from Sam in Rajasthan

“A female GIB, tagged in August 2025, had laid an infertile egg in Kutch, as this population has lost all its males long back. In a major trans-state conservation effort, a captive-bred GIB egg from the conservation breeding programme in Rajasthan was transported by road over 19 hours in a handheld portable incubator and was replaced in the nest on March 22. The female completed incubating this fertile egg and hatched it on March 26. The field monitoring team found the young chick being reared by its foster mother,” he said.

“It took an arduous 770-km road journey to transport an incubated egg to the desired nesting site in Kutch, which was undertaken without a break by creating a halt-free corridor from Sam (Rajasthan) to Naliya (Gujarat),” the ministry said in a note.

This is a significant development for the GIB conservation programme. Gujarat has only three surviving GIBs in the wild, and all are female. Hence, their eggs are all infertile.

There are only an estimated 150 GIBs in the wild in the country, mostly in Rajasthan. The large bird, a key indicator species of the grassland habitat, has faced population decline over the years due to hunting, habitat loss, and, in recent years, collisions with energy transmission lines that criss-cross their habitat in Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Sutirtha Dutta, Wildlife Institute of India (WII) scientist and project investigator, who accompanied the egg from Rajasthan to Gujarat, said selecting an egg of the right age and utmost care in its transportation were crucial. “You cannot carry eggs easily over a long distance, especially those which are below 10 days old; they are prone to damage. Typically, a GIB egg takes 22 days to hatch. From our captive breeding centre in Rajasthan, we chose a 15-16-day old egg. We made the incubator extra shock-proof and, throughout the road journey, one among our four-member team was holding the incubator,” Dutta told The Indian Express.

Earlier, the WII team and the Gujarat forest department had radio-tagged the female GIB in Naliya to track its movements, and to monitor if it laid an infertile egg.

In fact, preparations for this experiment were four years in the making. Under Project GIB, the WII and Rajasthan forest department have established two captive-breeding centres in Jaisalmer district. Here, eggs collected from the wild have been incubated artificially over the past few years, and chicks have been born even through artificial insemination. This has been done to develop a founder population for the GIB’s long-term recovery.

Chicks that have attained adulthood at the centre have mated and given birth to the next generation. The number of birds in the conservation breeding centres at Sam and Ramdevra in Rajasthan has now reached 73.

As part of the preparations, WII tested the “jumpstart” method in Desert National Park in Rajasthan, placing fertile eggs in the nests of female GIBs. In six trials, four fertile eggs were placed in the nests to see if the females would rear and hatch them, while in two cases, wooden eggs were placed.

“We did this to see whether the maternal instincts of the GIBs are working with the wild and wooden eggs. The wild eggs hatched into chicks and they survived, thus giving us confidence to go ahead with the Gujarat experiment,” Dutta said.

Gujarat’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forest and Chief Wildlife Warden Jaipal Singh said the next challenge was to protect the GIB chick from predators such as desert fox. “Our staff are monitoring the situation and we may also have to trap the predators who hunt GIBs,” he said.

Dutta added that the first four weeks are the most crucial for the chick’s survival.

Last July, The Indian Express reported that a Supreme Court-appointed expert committee had recommended the “jumpstart” method as a key conservation measure to revive the GIB population. In its report to the SC, the committee had said the female GIBs in Gujarat have been laying infertile eggs, adding that swapping these eggs with fertile ones from Rajasthan’s facilities would be a “rapid approach” to increase the GIB population in Gujarat.

The seven-member expert committee was tasked with prescribing measures to mitigate GIB deaths from power lines while balancing conservation goals with renewable energy development, and recommend any other conservation measures for the GIB’s survival. Last December, the SC had accepted this recommendation.