The good samaritans who care for our feathered friends

On a recent afternoon in Jacobpura, a nondescript, dusty neighbourhood in Gurugram’s Sector 12 sweltering in the summer heat, a stranger walks into the crammed front office of the Bird Charity Hospital, run by the local Jain Mandir trust, holding a little grey pigeon covered in pustules. Dr Raj Kumar, the vet on duty, takes one look at the tremulous creature and diagnoses it with avian pox. The rescuer hands over his charge silently and leaves, assured that it will be well taken care of.

The next few minutes pass swiftly. The bird is taken into an anteroom, examined quickly, and administered with basic drugs. Then it is admitted for further treatment and observation. An attendant takes it to its cage, next to fellow sufferers of the same disease. For the next couple of weeks, it will stay there until the quarantine period is over. As a patient at the Bird Charity Hospital, the baby pigeon will be nursed and fed by a small team of staff, free of cost, until it has fully recovered. Once it recovers the strength to fly, the bird will be released, free to live out its days as it wishes.

“We released 20 pigeons today and plan to set another 20 free tomorrow,” Dr Kumar says. “It is important for us to keep doing this work to make space for the 20-25 new cases we take in each day.” At any time, some 450-odd birds—raptors, parrots, eagles, even peacocks—jostle for space at this facility. Somehow, they manage to coexist without stepping on each other’s claws.

Since 2009, the hospital has released more than 22,000 healed birds, Dr Kumar says. “We have treated over 100,000 birds altogether, which includes pets like lovebirds, macaws or African grey parrot that people bring to us for monthly check-ups.” At any time, pigeons form the bulk of the patients, brought in not only by Good Samaritans like the man who dropped by earlier but also by the kabootar baaz, “pigeon racers,” people who breed, train and keep these birds at home.

Around 2008, Dr Kumar decided he wanted to be a vet, and especially look after birds. His intention was to do seva, he says, invoking the idea of selfless service that is a core tenet of Jainism. He interned for a year or so at the more famous, nearly century-old, bird hospital, also run by members of the Jain community, located opposite the historic Red Fort in Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi. There, he gathered hands-on experience before he joined the Gurugram chapter, which opened in 2009. Since then, he has dedicated his life to treating sick and injured birds, while making the public aware of big and small ways in which they can be compassionate to these winged creatures. A basic belief he holds close to his heart pertains to the inhumanity of keeping birds in captivity. But sadly, it’s a mindset that’s hard to shift.

The Wildlife Act of 1972, for instance, forbids keeping native parrot species like rose-ringed parakeet and plum-headed parakeet as pets, but these rules are flouted with impunity. As the afternoon wanes, a woman and her young daughter walk in with a baby parrot in a cage, asking if she could get a jodi (mate) for her tota. Dr Kumar doesn’t mince his words. “How would you feel if someone kept you in a cage like this?” he says. “If the police were to catch you with this caged bird, they may put you in prison.”

The woman is nonplussed. “I saved him from the roadside when he was a chick,” she says. “Poor thing would have died otherwise.”

“So, what’s stopping you from freeing it now that he is stronger?” Dr Kumar counters. She leaves without offering an answer.

At the Red Fort hospital, which stands on the premises of the famous Jain temple there, Dr Rameshwar Yadav echoes Dr Kumar. “We release all the birds we heal, even those that have been illegally kept as pets,” he says. Many of the cured birds end up living on or around the premises of the temple, subsisting in the ecosystem they have become used to. In both the facilities, every species is fed the appropriate diet of fruits, vegetables or grain. Being Jain institutions, meat is a strict no-no. “We give paneer (cottage cheese) to the non-vegetarian birds, like eagles,” Dr Kumar says, adding that they are adaptable to this change in diet.

Founded in 1929, as an institution with a long and august legacy, the Red Fort hospital has a generous amount of space with plenty of natural light pouring in. The care, hygiene and attention to detail are also better compared to the more modest and congested Gurugram unit. Over the years, it has become a crucial part of the Delhi darshan experience for tourists, which is in evidence as a guide ushers in two Australian visitors and shows them around, narrating a potted history of the hospital.

Healing touch

Twice a day, each of the two floors of the Bird Charity Hospital at Red Fort is cleaned. The food bowls get a refresh, the water is changed. The birds are housed in three distinct zones. First, there is “an ICU” for those who are in need of critical care. These patients require constant monitoring. “Eye infections, dehydration, heat stroke and diarrhoea are common during the summer,” Dr Yadav says. Many of the birds sit brooding, their wings bandaged or eyes closed. In winter, both hospitals tend to see more birds with paralysis caused by nerve-related ailments.

Then, as you walk around the first floor of the Red Fort hospital, you come to the recovery area. Here birds spend time post-surgery or when the worst of their conditions are past. This middle space reveals a motley crowd: a sullen-looking turkey, a solitary young peacock (his parents and siblings were hunted by dogs, an attendant says sadly), and some masakali, or white Indian fantail pigeons. Finally, there is a general ward where a bunch of birds, most strikingly a murder of exceedingly polite crows, sit still or hop around, testing out their wing strength. Once the birds are able to fly up to the ceiling and perch on the beams, it’s time to let them go.

Aside from clinical diseases, there are human-made dangers that besiege the birds in the city. Electrocution, wings being clipped to prevent prized fowls from flying away, and injuries caused during peak kite-flying seasons when people use manjha (synthetic kite string laced with metal or ground glass) lead to many avoidable tragedies. Documentary filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s Oscar nominated movie, All That Breathes (2023), tells the story of two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, who made it their life’s mission to free helpless birds from the death grip of manjha, before they decided to make the rescue of ill and injured birds their full-time occupation.

Walking around the bird hospitals is a sobering reminder of the bitter ironies of the Anthropocene Age. In the last week of May, when temperatures peaked to a crescendo in the National Capital Region, birds began to fall from the sky, fainting from the blazing heat. Citizens began to pick up the incapacitated creatures and send them to the Gurugram hospital through app-based delivery services like Porter. It was a peculiarly dystopian model of trying to fix the unbridled ills of development using some of the very tools responsible for spawning those ills in the first place.

“People have started coming to us from far and wide—Jaipur, Bijnor, Sonepat, Mathura, Lucknow,” Dr Kumar says. “I wish we would think about the animals and birds that live in our cities as much as we think about urban development.”