Twenty Houbara and Forty Years of Breeding: Saudi Arabia's Rewilding Test
On 18 January 2026 the Saudi Press Agency reported that 20 Asian houbara had been released in the Prince Mohammed bin Salman Royal Reserve in Tabuk, the first of their kind seen there in more than 35 years. Twenty birds is a small number and an enormous one: behind it sit four decades of captive breeding, a bird that is a cultural symbol of the Arabian Peninsula, and a question that releases alone cannot answer.
What went into the desert
The release was run jointly by the royal reserve, the National Center for Wildlife and the Prince Mohammed bin Salman Houbara Conservation Foundation, under the reserve's ReWild Arabia mission. Ten of the 20 birds carry satellite tags, which will report on survival, movement, habitat use and the threats they meet.
"We are testing rewilding techniques and generating the data that will guide future releases," said Olivier Combreau, chief executive of the foundation. The reserve itself stretches 24,500 square kilometres from the Harrat lava fields to the Red Sea coast and holds fifteen distinct ecosystems. It covers about 1% of the Kingdom's land area and 1.8% of its marine area, yet more than half of all bird species ever recorded in Saudi Arabia have been found inside it. The houbara is the thirteenth species reintroduced there; the programme intends to bring back 23.
The bird, and what happened to it
The Asian houbara (Chlamydotis macqueenii) is a bustard of stony desert and steppe, a walking bird the colour of gravel with black plumes down the neck, and the traditional quarry of Arabian falconry — recognised by UNESCO in 2021 as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which is precisely the difficulty: the bird is wanted both alive and hunted.
It is one of two houbara species: the African houbara of North Africa and the Canary Islands is largely resident, while the Asian houbara — Macqueen's bustard — migrates, and the two were separated as species only in 2003. Both kept the IUCN status of Vulnerable. Arabian houbara once bred across the peninsula, with early breeding records from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Oman, and the pressure on them is not only shotguns: overhunting, habitat degradation, commercial development, expanding agriculture, aquaculture, energy projects, mining and roads have all taken a share. A female weighs about 1.1 to 1.7 kilograms, a male 1.5 to 2.4. Egg-laying runs from January to June with a peak in mid-March, males begin displaying in December, and the nest is no more than a shallow scrape in open ground — which is why dogs, vehicles and people matter so much to a bird that nests with nothing above it.
Its historical range ran from Egypt to China. In Saudi Arabia it once bred widely and migratory birds wintered across much of the peninsula. Today no resident wild population remains in the Kingdom, and migrating houbara are seen only occasionally along the northern and eastern borders. BirdLife International's figures put the global population at roughly 33,000 to 67,000 birds, decreasing. The species is Vulnerable on the global IUCN Red List, and classified as Critically Endangered in the regional assessment for the Arabian Peninsula. Hunting, habitat loss and poaching from the mid-twentieth century onward did the damage — the houbara migrates across borders, and a bird that is protected in one country is shot in the next.
Forty years of breeding birds
It was in 1985 that the late Prince Saud bin Faisal established the Kingdom's first houbara breeding and research centre, in Taif. Four decades on, houbara are bred in large numbers, and the challenge has shifted. "The key conservation frontier is achieving the survival rates needed to establish self-sustaining wild populations," says Andrew Zaloumis, chief executive of the royal reserve. In other words: hatching houbara is a solved problem, and keeping them alive after release is not.
The uncomfortable question
Releases are not automatically conservation, and the houbara is the clearest example in the bird world. In August 2026 Mongabay reported that Nigel Collar of BirdLife International, who co-chairs the IUCN's Bustard Specialist Group, described Uzbekistan's release of more than 2,000 captive-bred houbara over three months as serving hunting rather than conservation: "There is no conservation strategy related to these releases." A 2018 study in Biological Conservation reached a compatible conclusion — captive breeding cannot sustain migratory Asian houbara without controls on hunting.
What makes the Tabuk release testable is the tags. A satellite-tagged bird that survives a summer, finds wintering grounds and returns is evidence; a tagged bird that does not is also evidence, and the programme says it will use both. For a species that is simultaneously a flagship, a prey item and a status symbol, that is the only argument that will settle the question.
Listening for a bird you may never see
Houbara are quiet, cryptic and now extremely rare; they also have no recording under a licence this site can host, so the Macqueen's Bustard page carries no player yet. What the reserve does have, in abundance, is the sound of its desert neighbours — the birds you would hear while watching for houbara tracks in the gravel.