Bustards, including floricans and korhaans, are large, terrestrial birds living mainly in dry grassland areas and in steppe regions. They range in length from 40 to 150 cm (16 to 59 in). They make up the family Otididae (/oʊˈtɪdɪdiː/, formerly known as Otidae).
Bustards are omnivorous and opportunistic, eating leaves, buds, seeds, fruit, small vertebrates, and invertebrates. There are 26 species currently recognised.
Otidimorphae is a clade of birds that contains the orders Cuculiformes (cuckoos), Musophagiformes (turacos), and Otidiformes (bustards) identified in 2014 by genome analysis. George Sangster and colleagues in 2022 named the clade uniting turacos and bustards as Musophagotides, defining it in the PhyloCode as "the least inclusive crown clade containing Otis tarda and Musophaga violacea, but not Grus grus or Mesitornis variegatus".
While the bustards seem to be related to the turacos, other genetic studies have found the cuckoos to be closer to the bustards than the turacos are.
Cuckoos are birds in the Cuculidae (/kjuːˈkjuːlɪdiː/ kew-KEW-lih-dee) family, the sole taxon in the order Cuculiformes (/kjuːˈkjuːlɪfɔːrmiːz/ kew-KEW-lih-for-meez). The cuckoo family includes the common or European cuckoo, roadrunners, koels, malkohas, couas, coucals, and anis. The coucals and anis are sometimes separated as distinct families, the Centropodidae and Crotophagidae, respectively. The cuckoo order Cuculiformes is one of three that make up the Otidimorphae, the other two being the turacos and the bustards. The family Cuculidae contains 150 species, which are divided into 33 genera.
The cuckoos are generally medium-sized, slender birds. Most species live in trees, though a sizeable minority are ground-dwelling. The family has a cosmopolitan distribution; the majority of species are tropical. Some species are migratory. The cuckoos feed on insects, insect larvae, and a variety of other animals, as well as fruit. Some species (for example, the majority of cuckoo species living in Eurasia) are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other species and giving rise to the terms "cuckoo's egg" and "cuckold" as metaphors. However, most species raise their own young.
Uthman (Arabic: عُثمَانُ, romanized: Uṯmānᵘ), also spelled Othman, is a male Arabic given name with the literal meaning of a young bustard, serpent, or dragon. It is popular as a male given name among Muslims. It is also transliterated as Osman or Usman, particularly when the name occurs in languages which either have no /θ/ sound or where the character ⟨ﺙ⟩ is pronounced differently, such as Persian, Bosnian, Turkish, and Urdu, as well as some Arabic dialects.
Originally the name often occurred as a nasab or patronymic in the names of children of people called Uthman, as in ibn Uthman "Son of Uthman" or bint Uthman "Daughter of Uthman". From there, it also developed into a surname.
The great bustard (Otis tarda) is a bird in the bustard family, and the only living member of the genus Otis. It breeds in open grasslands and farmland from northern Morocco, South and Central Europe to temperate Central and East Asia. European populations are mainly resident, but Asian populations migrate farther south in winter. Endangered as of 2023, it had been listed as a Vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List since 1996.
Portugal and Spain now host about 60% of the world's great bustard population. The species was extirpated in Great Britain in the 19th century, when the last bird was shot in 1832. Since 1998, The Great Bustard Group have helped reintroduce it to England on Salisbury Plain, a British Army training area. Here, the lack of public access and disturbance allows them the seclusion they desire as a large, ground-nesting bird.