The Asian houbara bustard is at grave risk of extinction. But help is now coming from countries whose ancient hunting traditions pose a major threat to this shy bird.

A houbara bustard on the arid steppe of Mori county, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. [China Daily]

Few Chinese have heard of the houbara bustard, fewer still have seen the bird in the wild. Nesting in the open deserts and arid steppes of Northwest and Northern China's Gansu province, and the Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions, it is a crane-like bird with a sandy buff plumage, mottled with dark-brown spots. Very shy and cunning, it can spot threats from hundreds of meters away, thanks to its superb vision.

But neither the houbara's guile and adaptation to marginal lands inhospitable to human beings, nor the nation's first-level protection are enough to save it from extinction.

This is a migratory bird and while flocking to Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, Afghanistan and Pakistan en route Central Asia for the winter, it faces its major threat - hunting.

The houbara is widely prized in the Arab world as an ultimate prey for falconers. Falconry, an Arab tradition from ancient times, has seen a resurgence recently with the growing affluence of the oil-producing nations.

"It was a way to make a living on the Arabian Peninsula," Dr Yang Weikang, an ecologist with the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, tells China Daily at his office in Urumqi.

"Now it's a high-tech sport, complete with GPS and four-wheel drives."

Besides hunting, the extension of agricultural lands and overgrazing have led to destruction of the houbara habitat and are important factors in the shrinking of the bird's Asian population - the largest of which stands at between 39,000 and 52,000.

"While the relative importance of these factors is not yet clear," Yang says, "the loss of habitat has affected the bird's population both on its breeding and wintering grounds, and on its migration routes."

International cooperation on research on the houbara and its conservation is the only way to save the bird, he says.

Since 1997, the institute has joined hands with the National Avian Research Center (NARC) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, for research on the houbara and its protection.

With financial and technical support from the center, XIEG's researchers have now determined the bird's distribution, migration routes and breeding grounds, made an estimate of its population, unraveled the mysteries surrounding its breeding and identified the main threats to its survival.

These have been published in the 2009 book titled, Houbara Bustard in China.