Botha's Lark pictured in recently burnt grassland
South Africa’s most threatened bird, the Botha’s Lark, is teetering on the brink of becoming the country’s first recorded avian extinction, with fewer than 340 individuals thought to remain in the wild.
Yet recent breakthrough discoveries have given conservationists a glimmer of hope for the country’s most endangered bird — most notably, its breeding rediscovery after 18 months.
In the past decade, the species has undergone a dramatic population collapse, with its numbers plunging by 90%.
According to BirdLife South Africa, it is not yet completely understood why this bird has disappeared from almost all of its historic range. Still, the decline “signals the possible collapse of an entire ecosystem” — South Africa’s grasslands.
As a ground-nesting grassland specialist, the species’ fragile survival is closely tied to the health of its high-altitude grassland habitat. Found only in pockets of Mpumalanga and the Free State, the Botha’s Lark is a “true endemic to South Africa”.
The scale of the decline saw the species uplisted to critically endangered in BirdLife South Africa’s Regional Red Data Book for South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini, just one category away from extinction in the wild.
In response, the avian conservation non-profit created a dedicated grasslands conservation team to study the species and safeguard the habitat it depends on.
The team includes a biodiversity stewardship specialist promoting sustainable land and agricultural practices, a community outreach officer building relationships with landowners and local communities, and a conservation biologist leading field research and monitoring.
Together, they’re trying to buy the species time. The team’s first challenge was simply to find it.
After the species went unrecorded for 18 months and vanished from its historic strongholds, conservation biologist Matthew Orolowitz, the birding ecotours fellow of grasslands conservation, laced up his boots.
He walked more than 500km across the Highveld in search of the elusive bird, and his persistence paid off in the summer of 2024/2025, when he located a small breeding group.
Nineteen nests were discovered, each holding two to three eggs, but only eight chicks fledged. The rest succumbed to predators or unusual weather conditions. For a species this scarce, every lost chick is a blow. The poor breeding success underscored just how precarious the lark’s survival has become.
Worryingly, no other breeding population was found for another year. With urgency building, BirdLife South Africa launched a large-scale coordinated search, drawing in more than 40 volunteer birders.
Thanks to access granted by farmers, communal land authorities and other land users, teams surveyed sites across a vast sweep of grassland from Amersfoort to Harrismith. Over a single event, volunteers logged 5 644 observations of 227 bird species, including 31 species of conservation concern.
But one discovery eclipsed them all: a previously unknown population of Botha’s Larks — only the second known site where the species persists today.
The find marked a turning point, demonstrating the power of citizen science and coordinated fieldwork. Rediscovery, however, does not mean recovery. As agricultural practices shift and grasslands shrink, the bird is increasingly forced to search for dwindling pockets of suitable habitat.
“There is no simple solution,” Orolowitz said.
“Many factors — agricultural expansion, grazing changes, climate variability, and infrastructure development — may be contributing. We must continue working with farmers, communal land users, conservation authorities and schools to create safe places where the species can survive.”
Saving the species requires more than protecting isolated patches and means safeguarding entire grassland systems, said BirdLife South Africa’s landscape conservation programme manager, Ernst Retief.
“We need to conserve the complete landscape where the species occurs, benefiting not only the Botha’s Lark but other birds, invertebrates and plants too,” he said.
While discovering small breeding populations is encouraging, the reality is dire: only about 20 sightings have been recorded over the past few years, David Ehlers Smith, the science and spatial planning project manager at BirdLife South Africa, highlighted.
“Confirming whether the species persists elsewhere is vital to guiding our research priorities and the lark’s survival prospects,” he said.
Despite the odds, the organisation remains resolute, given that birds are woven into the country’s natural heritage and play essential ecological roles.
“Of these, the Botha’s Lark deserves special attention and care to ensure its future. BirdLife South Africa calls on all birders, landowners and conservationists to assist in saving this iconic species,” it said.