HIS REDDISH brown neck swells to the size of a football. Atop it, a blue-grey head proudly sports what looks like a drooping handlebar moustache. Up goes a fan of bright white feathers across his back as he struts his flamboyant stuff. A metre tall and weighing in at around 20 kilograms, the male Eurasian great bustard in mating mode is an impressive sight.
This display was once common in the UK. But the great bustard – which shares the title of world’s heaviest flying bird with two cousins, the Kori bustard and the great Indian bustard – became extinct here almost two centuries ago. Worldwide, its numbers have now dwindled to between 44,000 and 57,000, with most living in Spain and Russia. Yet, on a blustery autumn day, from a hide on the edge of Ministry of Defence land on Salisbury plain, Wiltshire, I can see 16 through my binoculars. They are here thanks to the Herculean efforts of a charity called the (GBG), and one man in particular, the indomitable David Waters.
Just three years ago, a major partnership set up to drive the project forward collapsed acrimoniously and the prospects for the return of the great bustard seemed poor. Now, remarkably, Waters and his team claim they stand on the brink of having a self-sustaining wild population in the UK. If they’re right, this would be a major conservation triumph, and a personal vindication for Waters in the face of deep scepticism from many conservation scientists and organisations.
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However some, including former collaborators, remain unconvinced, suggesting that the GBG’s claim that the UK population now numbers almost 50 adults is optimistic and that it is far from self-sufficiency. During my visit to the GBG’s two secret release sites, I saw 32 of various ages. I later saw many more at the home in a nearby village Waters shares with his wife Karen, two Labradors, two springer spaniels and a cavalier King Charles spaniel. Three magnificent stuffed bustard heads dominate the utility room. There is a bustard boot scraper at the door, a bustard weather vane on the roof and dozens of paintings and photographs of bustards on the walls. Fergus and Ramona, great bustards injured during quarantine, live in a pen taking up much of the garden.
It is hard to resist thinking that the large grey moustache and lamb chop sideburns that Waters sports are inspired by the facial appearance of the male great bustard. There’s no doubt his extraordinary two-decade-long quest has come to define him. Most people would have quit long ago, but Waters, who describes himself as “bloody-minded”, seems to redouble his efforts when faced with hurdles. He distrusts experts who fail to “get their boots dirty”. “I like to think I don’t have a problem with people who have a different opinion,” he says. “But I’m not afraid of speaking up, even if that upsets others, if I think someone is being misleading or doing a bad job.” Karen puts it slightly differently. “He thinks he’s always right,” she says. “He isn’t always right.” After a short pause she adds: “But about bustards he is.”
Waters got his love of birds from his father Estlin, an epidemiologist at the University of Southampton. He has fond memories of family trips to watch seabirds on the Scottish island of May, and Skomer, off the Welsh coast. His first encounter with a great bustard was at the age of 13, when he saw a displaying male during a visit to a captive breeding programme run by the Great Bustard Trust at Porton Down in Wiltshire. He was so impressed he became a volunteer.
Later, Waters began studying for a degree in biological sciences and environmental pollution, but gave up after a year, describing the course as “tedious and mentally vacuous”. Then, following a brief stint in the army, he joined the police force. He kept his ties with the Great Bustard Trust though, and in 1996, when its founder Aylmer Tryon died, he suggested a new approach. The birds in the captive breeding programme had not produced any offspring. Waters’s idea was to rear chicks imported from Russia and release them, but it didn’t go down well with others at the trust. Where most would have given up, Waters set up his own group, the GBG, and later began to learn Russian.
Worst of times
Following some frustrating delays, the group finally gained a licence to import and release chicks from Russia in 2004. The next few years were hard. Waters had assumed large conservation organisations would get behind the project, but many thought it was overly ambitious and unlikely to succeed. So the GBG was largely reliant on public donations and volunteers. Waters, who had given up his job to focus on the reintroduction, says he sometimes worked seven days a week, doing cleaning and delivery jobs to make ends meet, and that he and Karen put in tens of thousands of pounds of their own money. “I have come very close to chucking it all in,” he admits.
The birds were faring little better, despite the elaborate measures the GBG took to prepare them for life in the wild. They wore bustard-shaped glove puppets when feeding chicks and “dehumanisation suits”, which hide the arms and legs. Young birds got predator awareness training, in which they were shown stuffed foxes and then soaked with water pistols. It did them little good. Of 167 chicks released between 2004 and 2012, only 17 made it to 1-year-old.
Things were looking bleak when, in 2010, the GBG’s luck turned. Senior figures at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) had a change of heart. Along with Natural England, a government conservation agency, and the University of Bath, it sponsored a funding bid with the GBG that brought in over €1 million of European Union money. was set up, new staff were recruited, equipment bought and a second release site established.
Almost immediately relationships began to sour. Waters saw the tracking of the birds, which his new partners insisted on, as harmful to their development. He opposed repeated demands to mix up different groups of chicks before release to ensure randomisation, saying this undermined their developing pecking order. “Science is essential to the project,” says Waters. “But we had academics who saw this an experiment to generate data so they could get the publications they needed to secure their funding.”
Things looked very different on the other side of the table. “We needed to know where the birds were going, so monitoring them post-release was crucial,” says Andy Evans, RSPB lead on the project. Conflicts of interest and differences of opinion were amplified by personality clashes. “Very soon after I joined, it became clear it was being run as a dictatorship,” says Kate Ashbrook who started full-time on the project in 2011 as a University of Bath postdoc. “David didn’t like others taking initiatives or trying to make changes.”
Fraught relations worsened with a bitter dispute over a led by Ashbrook. It found that of the 167 birds released up to 2012, 65 per cent had been recovered dead and 29 per cent had disappeared. Just one chick born in the wild had made it to 100 days. Only nine adults remained alive by late 2014.
Waters describes the review as “misleading”, because it failed to include what he believes was a game-changing advance in the project’s prospects. New research at the University of Chester had shown that extinct British bustards were closer to Spanish ones than to the Russian population long thought to be the best match. This meant instead of suffering the damaging 30-day quarantine endured by the Russian chicks, from 2014, Spanish eggs were imported for incubation and hatching in the UK. But a big jump in chick survival rates seen in spring 2015 was not recorded in the review published that June. “It was like a sports correspondent writing about a match having watched only the first half,” says Waters.
Ashbrook hits back in kind: “He is like a parent complaining that their child gets their annual report at the end of a school year as opposed to waiting until they have finished their education.” And she points out that negative findings are important. “A lot of conservation literature tends to focus on successes, but actually we need people reporting failures, otherwise how are we supposed to learn?”
In November 2014, the four bustard LIFE+ project partners released a joint statement announcing the collaboration was to end nine months early. Waters and his band of volunteers continued regardless, going on to rear and release three more batches of Spanish bustards in 2015, 2016 and 2017. However, the project was taking a heavy toll on him. “It reached a point where I was physically, mentally and financially shattered,” he says. In 2016, he took a step back. Ruth Manvell, a former government avian virologist, was appointed as director.
The GBG has continued to adapt its methods since the collapse of the LIFE+ project. Its feed now contains fewer insects and more calcium-rich vegetation. Chicks are handled less, taken for walks to help them develop, and released earlier. Tracking devices are designed to fall off six months after release. “Their improved condition can be seen in their plumage,” says Waters. “Survival is up from under 20 per cent to 50 per cent. We’re now getting the numbers that allow a proper social structure to develop.” Last winter, the birds split into separate male and female flocks for the first time, instead of dispersing, often never to be seen again, as they had before. “This is what we would expect to see in the wild,” says Waters. “We’re on the point of self-sustainability.”
The new approach is undoubtedly delivering better results, but quantifying this is hard. The GBG’s shift from wing to leg tags, which are less likely to impede flying or attract predators, has made counting the birds difficult. Manvell estimates the adult population at between 42 and 47, to which can be added this year’s 23 releases and the three wild chicks that have been spotted. “Most of our females will become productive breeders over the next two years,” she says. “I’m fairly confident that if we have another good year we can reach a self-sustaining population of about 100.”
“It reached a point where I was physically, mentally and financially shattered”
, says she still has contacts close to the project who are sceptical about these numbers. She believes talk of self-sustainability is close is wishful thinking. Nevertheless, she wishes the project well. “If they are seeing the birds starting to behave more like a wild population that’s encouraging,” she says.
The next few years will reveal who is right. If Waters is vindicated, it will not be the first time a maverick has swum against the tide and proved the conservation establishment wrong. , for example, is credited with saving five species of bird from extinction including the Mauritius kestrel, pink pigeon and echo parakeet. In doing so, he faced down opposition to his controversial techniques, such as captive breeding, intensive invasive predator control and the release of species outside their historic range to fill ecological niches left empty by extinctions.
Whether Waters will one day be feted like Jones remains to be seen. But the GBG has certainly broken new ground in rearing and release techniques that could help in other projects. And whatever Waters’s faults, it is hard not to be impressed by his passion, determination, ambition and sheer stubborn refusal to waiver in the face of adversity. “David is a hugely energetic and dedicated person with a lot of drive and dedication,” says Evans, despite their past differences. “Conservation has benefited greatly from personalities like him in the past.”
Of course, the great bustards must play their part too. Success or failure now rests to a large extent on the breeding efforts of a couple of dozen females… with a little help from their flamboyant mates.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Bustard or bust”
