Today's Edition
MAYS IBRAHIM (AL AIN)
In a climate-controlled room in Al Ain, a single houbara bustard egg rests in an artificial incubator – numbered, disinfected, and routinely inspected.
It is one of thousands that will hatch this season as part of an ambitious Houbara bustard conservation programme.
Under the vision of the UAE's Founding Father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi's International Fund for Houbara Conservation (IFHC) has been dedicated to securing a sustainable future for this once-vulnerable bird species for over 40 years.
The desert outside may not guarantee ideal conditions for the migratory bird to breed, but inside the fund's closed facilities, the climate is calibrated to the decimal – temperature, humidity, light – nothing is left to chance, as researchers work to regenerate the houbara bustard's wild populations.
At Al Ain International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition 2025 (AAIHEX), Aletihad sat down with Hamda Al Ameri, Senior Specialist – Education Programme at the IFHC, who detailed the careful processes behind the breeding and release programme.
"The UAE is not the natural habitat for the Asian houbara; that's why our breeding centres are indoor facilities, so we can simulate its natural conditions," she explained.
These rooms are integral to stabilising the numbers of a species long threatened by hunting, habitat loss, and disrupted migration routes.
The fund's facilities span three locations chosen with scientific precision.
Pakistani-origin birds form the genetic backbone of the UAE breeding programme, while birds in Morocco belong to the North African subspecies, and the Kazakhstan centre focuses on migratory Asian lineages native to Central Asia.
Houbara migration routes are influenced by their genes, according to Al Ameri.
"We select resident-lineage Asian houbara for breeding inside the UAE, so they don't migrate but live year-round here," she said.
The Science Behind the Programme
The breeding process starts with collecting reproductive material from selected males.
After testing its quality, it is matched with the most genetically compatible female.
A vast internal database - described by Al Ameri as "the biggest family tree of the houbara" - stores the full genetic history of every bird and guides every insemination decision.
"We analyse every detail to decide which female is the best candidate," she said.
Once females start laying eggs, each one is collected, disinfected, and assigned a unique identification number.
"The number is crucial," Al Ameri stressed. "It becomes the bird's identity forever."
The eggs then move into artificial incubators for around 20 days, where they are monitored through candling and kept carefully separated so that shells – and their numbers – can never be mixed.
A single incubator room can hold up to 750 eggs in a season, according to Al Ameri.
Once the chicks hatch, they are divided according to their role in the programme; some will remain in the centres as future breeders, while others are prepared for release into the wild.
Chicks destined for release are conditioned to ensure they are capable of survival.
Feed and water are reduced, human presence is restricted, and birds are moved at one month old to outdoor enclosures known as tunnels, where they learn to tolerate heat.
When the birds are ready, some are sent to sustainable hunting reserves, others are provided to falconers for training, and the remainder are released directly into the wild. Before release, each bird is fitted with a solar-powered tracker that can last for up to 10 years, providing migration data, stopover points, and breeding behaviour.
Falconers as Vital Conservation Allies
In 2020, the houbara fund launched a major awareness campaign targeting falconers - long-time hunters of the prized bird. In response, falconers submitted 2,024 reports of houbara catches between 2020 and 2025.
Almost all of them (2,014) involved captive-bred birds, while only 10 were wild, according to Al Ameri.
The reports revealed that 120 released birds survived more than three years, while 13 had lived beyond five.
They also allowed the IFHC to trace where the birds had originally been released and how far they had travelled. Seventy-five percent of the catches involved birds released in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, 30% were traced back genetically to Central Asian lineages, and 60% were caught during migration.
"The campaign helped us map the primary migration lines of the Houbara," Al Ameri said.
"The birds raised in captivity follow the same natural migration routes as wild birds, which shows our strategy is working."
A Future Rewritten
The first captive-bred Asian houbara chick hatched at Al Ain Zoo in 1982.
In 2007, the UAE witnessed the first natural nesting of a released captive-bred female in the wild.
Today, nearly a million houbaras have been bred across three countries, of which 598,314 have been released into the wild.
The breeding population of the North African houbara (Chlamydotis undulata) grew from just 305 birds in 1997 to 8,619 in 2025. The Asian houbara (Chlamydotis macqueenii) expanded even more rapidly, rising from 36 breeders to 20,623 over the same period.
In the UAE, the NARC and SKHBC-AD facilities together hold around 14,500 cages and 4,300 tunnels across an area of 47 sq. km.
In Morocco, the ECWP centre contains 10,300 cages and 1,750 tunnels spread over 13 sq. km.
The Kazakhstan facility, SKHBC-KZ, operates 10,200 cages and 950 tunnels across 10 sq. km.
Visitors of AAIHEX can learn more about the houbara fund and its conservation journey by engaging with an interactive chatbot.
