Great bustard chicks have hatched for the first time in Britain in almost two centuries. At least three chicks from two nests are being watched over by their mothers at a secret location on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.

The great bustard, Otis tarda, was hunted to extinction in Britain and the last chick was seen with its mother in Suffolk in 1832.

The latest attempt to bring back the largest European and heaviest flying bird, weighing on average around 18kg (40lb), has taken five years and conservationists are delighted.

The chicks were first seen on Sunday, rooting in grass for food. Experts believe that they were probably born the previous day.

Times Archive, 1966: The Great Bustard - A lost bird lamented

Odd notes tell of the bustard's feathers having been specially esteemed by fly-dressers

• The Great Bustard, 1907

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David Waters, founder and director of the Great Bustard Group, said that 18 adult great bustards were living on, or near, the plain. Several others had flown to other territories in southern Wiltshire.

He said: “We are really excited and are confident other chicks will be found before the end of the week. We just don’t know how many nests there are or how many chicks.”

The species was once commonly found in the Yorkshire Wolds, Lincolnshire, East Anglia and Salisbury Plain. It is included on the Wiltshire coat of arms.

Mr Waters’s boyhood dream was to see the reintroduction of the species. As a child he visited Porton Down scientific research establishment and has never forgotten the wonder of seeing a pair of tame great bustards that scientists were trying to breed.

“I thought then this is something we are going to get back,” he said.

An attempt to reintroduce the birds in the 1970s failed but in 2004 Mr Waters persuaded Ben Bradshaw, then the Animal Welfare Minister, to grant a licence for the importation of great bustard chicks from the Saratov area of east Volga in Russia.

Since then, every August a consignment of between 6 and 36 chicks has been transported to Ministry of Defence-owned farmland on the plain. Many fell prey to foxes and others were too frail to survive.

Mr Water believed that previous attempts to breed failed because of the youth of the males. Eggs have been laid but failed to hatch.

Dr Mark Avery, conservation director at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which has recently joined the project group, said: “Establishing a new population here should ensure a brighter future for this globally threatened bird, which continues to decline across parts of Europe.”

Visits to see the great bustard are arranged by the Great Bustard Group. It needs to raise £130,000 a year to pay for the reintroductions and conservation work in Russia.

Mr Waters said that the group had a ten-year licence to bring bustards to the UK but it might take many more years before there was a sustainable population.

Wing and a prayer story

—There are some 20,000 bustards in Europe in Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Russia. They are also found further east in Ukraine, Mongolia and China

—Great bustards can live for up to 25 years

—Adult males can weigh more than 20kgs (44lbs). Females are much smaller, about 3 to 4kgs. They can be more than a metre tall

—The bird has to run as well as flap to get airborne. Once aloft, it can fly a maximum of about three miles

—Males and female adults live in separate flocks for most of the year. They mate in April. Females lay two or three eggs on the ground. Incubation is 26-28 days. Chicks are reared by females.

—Disappearance from Britain is linked to farming practices and ornithologists who killed birds for specimens. Great bustards were also popular as food. The 1390 cookbook A Forme of Cury includes a recipe for them

Sources: Great Bustard Group, RSPB

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