The Great Indian Bustard weighs up to 15 kilograms, stands nearly a metre tall, and cannot see power lines until it is already flying into them. That single biological fact, a visual field oriented downward for scanning prey, not forward for scanning obstacles, explains more about why this bird is dying than any other single factor. There are fewer than 150 left in the wild, almost all in Rajasthan's Thar desert and the Kutch grasslands of Gujarat, and the number has been falling for decades without a clean reversal in sight.
