24 March, 2025
By Alexander Trifunovic
Adult male Bengal Florican (Houbaropsis bengalensis) in Orang National Park, India. What remains of this species is mainly distributed across various protected areas and parks. Photo by Nejib Ahmed, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Bengal Florican (Houbaropsis bengalensis) holds the precarious title of “most endangered bustard”. Like other bustards, this species is a long-legged ground bird of open grasslands. Males are a stately black, white and mottled brown with long breast feathers, and in flight, the wing panel opens to reveal startlingly bright white wings. Females contrast the male’s black plumage with a muted buffy brown, perfectly camouflaged in tall grass and vegetation. The Bengal Florican inhabits flat, moist grasslands with a mosaic of burned or grazed and undisturbed habitat in northern India, southern Nepal, and the Tonle Sap floodplain of central Cambodia. Their preferred patchwork of habitat types provides open areas of very short or burned grass for the males to perform their terrific leaping displays and dense cover for the females to nest.
Bengal Florican on its breeding grounds. Photo by Yung-Kuan Lee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via iNaturalist.
The Bengal Florican is listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN and has a small, fragmented population suffering dramatic declines from habitat loss for agriculture, changes in grassland management, and hunting. The nominate subspecies H. b. bengalensis that occurs in India and Nepal is mostly distributed between several protected areas, but even habitat in some national parks is becoming less suitable for this species as management practices change. The Southeast Asian subspecies H. b. blandini was extirpated from southern Vietnam, but a population was discovered on the Tonle Sap floodplain in 1999. This population is severely threatened by conversion of native habitat to intensive, industrial-scale rice fields and declined by 44-64% between 2005 and 2012, and it is at high risk of being extirpated from Cambodia by the end of the decade without intervention.
Distribution of Bengal Florican, showing areas where the species has been extirpated and where it still survives, courtesy of Birdlife International.
There is ongoing work in Cambodia to train local farmers, provide financial incentives for reporting nests and fledglings, and community-based management and monitoring of breeding sites. Rice grown in a Florican-friendly way is purchased at a premium and locals guide Cambodian birding tours through the Sam Veasna Center to gain additional income. The future of the Bengal Florican is uncertain, but the collaboration between farmers, scientists, governments, and organizations gives a glimmer of hope for this charismatic bird.
Bengal Florican in flight. Photo by Xavier Rufray, CC BY-SA 4.0, via iNaturalist.
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