Black kites are common throughout the world, at least
throughout Eurasia. They’re very common in the skies above Delhi, circling and
soaring, living mostly on garbage and the occasional small animal.
In a place as flat as Delhi, there are no crags for eagles
and the like to make their eyries. Several kites have made their nests in the
trees on the compound where we live. They can get a little protective too,
dive-bombing residents who get too close to the nests.
This year, from the nest closest
to our house, a baby kite (a very large baby – the kites are a very large bird)
fell from the nest and was living on the ground. Its mother would swoop down to
feed it, and watch over it from a perch on top of the flagpole. And whack
anyone who got too close.
What became apparent, though, was
that the baby had a broken wing – it would run and try to fly, with one wing
flapping at a strange angle. It wasn’t going to fly.
We looked after it a little bit.
The bird would overcome any fear if mincemeat was on offer, but would ignore
completely a pork chop (though its mother didn’t, whacking me on the head when
I tried to recover a chop to place it closer to the baby, then wheeling back
and diving down to clutch the chop and fly off).
The baby would hop under the sprinkler,
and tip its head sideways to get a drink from the water lying on the grass,
cooling off in the Delhi summer’s forty plus.
The kites are at the top of the
food chain in Delhi, so the baby kite was pretty safe in the medium term, with
us and its mother to look after it, and no other animal daring to get close to
anything with such a powerful beak. But the mothers abandon their babies at
about the start of the monsoon – only a few weeks away.
At that point, the baby would
slowly start to starve, as not only would its mother abandon it, but most human
inhabitants of the compound too would be disappearing at the end of the school
year, only days away.
The idea of the bird slowly
starving, until so weak that the crows (or other kites) could swing down and
torture it to death, didn’t appeal to me. So I called a vet for advice.
The vet suggested the Jain Bird
Hospital – there’s a bird hospital in Delhi, part of the Jain temple opposite
the Red Fort, right in the centre of old Delhi. I called them and explained
there was a kite chick with a broken wing in the garden – ‘chill’ the guy said
– okay, I can chill – what? “Not a chick, a chill,” he said. Okay, a kite chill
– I can’t find any reference to it being called a chill anywhere else, but I
can go with that.
The hospital said they’d look
after the bird, but I had to bring it to them. So I spoke to the guy in charge
of property, who spoke to another guy, who spoke to the head gardener, who
assembled a large team, who hunted the chill down and put it in a cage usually
used to trap cats. Then we put the cage in the back of the car, and the driver
took me and a couple of boys off to the hospital.
Took us an hour to get there –
wrong time of day, wrong part of the city. The bird, though, survived the trip.
That part of town, in the old
city, beside Chandi Chowk, opposite the Red Fort, the footpath is covered with
vendors, selling anything – brightly coloured plastic, cloth cut and assembled
into human shapes, footwear, badly fried food, anything really.
I could see the Jain temple, and
cut through the gate to see if there really was a bird hospital inside. Found a
guy, sitting on a fence, completely naked, slightly overweight, dispensing
advice about what was printed on sheets of paper handed to him by reverent (and
clothed) Indians. Got harassed by the temple hangers-on about wearing shoes in
the temple precinct. And found a small door (I had to duck) up an irregular set
of stairs (where I had to duck a few more times) plastered with advice about
the importance of birds and being nice to them, that led to the bird hospital.
Did they want the bird? Yes they
did. Would they come with me back to the car to get it? Yes they would. We
trundled off together – the footwear fanatics didn’t seem to care to bother the
veterinarian dude the way they’d harassed me – back to the car. The vet opened
the box and grabbed the bird – no gloves, no hesitation – and started back
towards the hospital. Could me and the boys come too? Sure. Off we went. Shoes
back off again to walk across ten metres of grubby temple turf, and back up the
irregular stairs.
The hospital filled a floor of a
building – about the size of a terrace house, but with windows on both sides.
Filled with bird cages mostly, birdcages filled with a variety of birds, small
to large, colourful to plain, shrill to silent, still to swooping and climbing,
with a reception area and a veterinarian’s area as well. The doc took the bird
straight to his surgery. He sprayed it with some stuff, put some other stuff
down its throat, grabbed its wings and held the bird in a certain way (that
caused the bird to make a big noise and try to bite him), and then told me – in
a kind of English that didn’t leave much room for conversation, that the bird
would be flying … in five or six days! Then he took it away and put it in a
cage.
There were simply hundreds of
cages in the hospital. The centre of the floor was filled, floor to ceiling,
with individual cages, backing on to each other. Much larger cages pushed
against the walls. I got the impression the patients started out in the smaller
cages, then moved to a larger cage before being freed. Though the bird we’d
delivered, perhaps in deference to its size and ferocity, was immediately
allocated a large cage against the outside wall, with a window to freedom.
Not all the birds in the hospital
were held in cages – quite a few small things were flitting about in the air,
while others walked upon the floor, and others still clung to different places
on the walls.
We were done. I was given a
receipt for the bird, and told I couldn’t have it back, that it would be set
free. Fine by me. We made a donation clearly more than any anticipated. Fine by
me again. And we headed home – much more quickly than we’d arrived, given the
passage of time, and the movement of traffic at that time of day.
Of course, the story was not
quite over yet. Mother bird was fretting like mad at the absence of her chill.
Calling for it all hours of the day. Waiting for it to re-appear from under the
vegetation growing alongside the fence that the chill had made its home.
Waiting in vain – that chill’s not coming back. She was still hanging around
when we departed India at school’s end two days’ later. Of course, she still
had a nest in the tree, and another chill hanging around as well.
Hopefully, the next time she sees
her wayward offspring will be a reunion in the skies. Who knows?
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