The Great Indian Bustard weighs up to 15 kilograms, stands a metre tall, and is functionally extinct in the wild, with fewer than 150 individuals surviving across Rajasthan and Gujarat. It is the world's heaviest flying bird. It needs open grassland to breed, to forage, and to display. What it does not need, and cannot survive alongside, is trees. Yet for decades, the land it depends on has been handed over to tree-planting drives, solar farms, and agricultural conversion, all of it legally uncontroversial, because the land was officially classified as wasteland.
