Food and Water 
To find food and water in the apparently inhospitable arid to 
desert ranges of southern Asia presents problems beyond the resources 
of most birds. Only those species that can forage over wide areas and 
flourish on a relatively limited array of plant and/or animal materials, 
can survive. Among game birds only bustards and the sandgrouse have 
become adapted, through the ages, to habitats where precipitation is 
often only 3 to 6 inches a year. Sandgrouse have solved the problem of 
finding food and water in desert regions through their ability to sub- 
sist largely on grass and weed seeds, sometimes much smaller than 
the head of a pin, and to fly long distances to water. 
Sandgrouse are often satisfied to laboriously glean the smallest 
seeds, usually reserved for birds of much lesser size, Wemshurst (27) 
found about 30,000 tiny seeds of clover (Melilotus sp.) and of vetch 
(Astragalus sp.) in one bird collected in Iraq or Iran. The imperial 
sandgrouse as an additional adaptation, utilizes large seeds, including 
waste grains to a much greater extent than do most Asian sandgrouse. 
Baker (3) indicates that "the food is mainly seeds and grain with 
some leaves and young shoots and buds -- but they will also eat insects 
of many kinds ~- white ants, beetles, larvae, etc.'' Dement'ev (15) gives 
the food as "seeds and shoots of steppe and desert plants, sagebrush 
(Artemesia spp.), Russian thistles (Salsala spp.), camel thorn (Alhagi 
-camelorum) etc., and insects in small numbers," 
No detailed study of food consumed seasonally has been made. I 
collected a number of birds in Turkey between 1950 and 1953 but adequate 
facilities for identifying to genera and species the foods eaten, were 
not then available. Twenty imperials were shot at a waterhole, surrounded 
by cultivation, on July 29 west of Konya, Turkey. Of these birds, 13 had 
eaten only weed seeds, 4 crops contained weed seeds and wheat or culti- 
vated legumes, and 3 were empty. Most of the birds had also taken grit 
in the form of a few small stones. No green food or insects were present, 
although on two occasions birds collected in April had eaten what 
appeared to be green shoots of wheat. Three birds collected in May near 
Tuz Golu, a large salt lake south of Ankara, contained only weed seeds. 
Of two birds shot southwest of Teheran, Iran, on October 26, 1950, 
one had dined entirely on the curled tips of an unidentified desert plant, 
the other contained about 70 percent of weed seeds and 30 percent of wheat. 
There was general agreement among agriculturalists in Turkey that the 
wheat eaten by imperial sandgrouse was waste grain remaining on the ground 
after the spring harvest and that the bird did no damage to agricultural 
crops. This is in distinct contrast to the pin-tailed sandgrouse (P. 
alchata) which gather in enormous flocks. In Iraq I watched several such 
packs moving across a farmer's primitively seeded field, like a swarm of 
locusts,consuming as much of the freshly planted wheat as they could find. 
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