A FLOCK OF CATTLE EGRETS takes flight from the banks of the Yamuna River in Delhi, India’s capital city. They arc in unison above the sluggish river, enshrouded by dust from the labyrinth of bridges under construction across it. Beneath them, a truck has caused traffic to jam on the narrow street leading to the riverside locality known as Wazirabad. It’s a concrete jungle of small-scale businesses, half-constructed houses, and alleys — and an unlikely address for my destination today, a rescue and rehabilitation center for birds. When I first visited the center over 10 years ago, it was housed on their terrace overlooking Old Delhi’s iconic Jama Masjid. Having expanded, it has since shifted to this location. I ask a fruit seller at a roadside kiosk for directions.

“Do you mean the place run by those crazy brothers who treat ugly black kites? They spend all their hard-earned money buying meat for the birds,” he says, pointing me in the right direction.

The fruit-seller’s comment about hard-earned money is on point. Wildlife Rescue has been running, quite literally, on a wing and a prayer for almost two decades. Founded and largely self-funded by brothers Nadeem Shehzad, 45, and Mohammad Saud, 41, who share the belief that every living thing has the right to live, receive treatment if injured, and at the end, die with dignity, the center treats between 10 and 25 injured birds a day, and more than 3,300 annually.

It all began in 1997 when the brothers rescued a wounded black kite in Old Delhi, only to discover that the nearest bird hospital, run by the strictly vegetarian Jain community, would not treat birds of prey since they are meat eaters. Unable to help, the brothers left the bird where they had picked it up. Over the next few years, Shehzad and Saud would often come across injured kites on the streets, but they wouldn’t pick up the birds because they had no idea where to take them for medical care. One day, however, the sight of yet another injured kite became more than they could bear. They brought it home, and, with help from their neighbor, a kabootar baaz (pigeon keeper), they sutured its broken wing. A passion to save kites and other birds has consumed the brothers ever since. They have dedicated their lives to rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing injured birds of prey, while battling superstitions that some birds, especially kites and owls, bring bad luck — which explains why people drive these birds away and are unwilling to help them when they’re injured.

I find Shehzad standing in front of Wildlife Rescue’s current office. “I’d never imagined that we’d expand so much since the time you visited us in Old Delhi,” he says. “Then, we tended to 15 to 20 birds at a time; now, we have between 150 to 300 patients.” The birds are everywhere — on the ground floor, which functions as a triage area; in the basement, which houses a sealed operation chamber; and on the terrace, where they recover. “When they’re well enough, they fly away,” Shehzad says. “But most return for months to roost, or perhaps when they feel like some chicken for dinner!”

Saud comes up from the basement, where the two brothers also run a small-scale soap-dispenser manufacturing business. Saud spends the first half of his day on the business, before tending to the patients arriving from rescue sites and bird hospitals across Delhi. “The birds always take precedence,” he says, adding cheerfully, “perhaps that’s one reason why our business is floundering!”

“Over the years, we’ve been able to tell the state of our city from the kinds of problems that our patients have.”

It’s noon, and the brothers are waiting for Salik Rehman, their young colleague, who is tasked each day with picking up carnivorous birds from the Jain bird hospital as well as other government-run veterinary facilities. “The Jains can’t feed them, the government veterinary hospitals don’t treat birds, so we do the best we can,” Saud says.

“Over the years, we’ve been able to tell the state of our city from the kinds of problems that our patients have,” he says. “When there’s a heatwave, they fall from the sky, dehydrated. Every now and then, we get birds that have eaten poisoned feed left by farmers to drive away ‘pests.’ In spring, nesting season, we get entire broods left homeless when trees are felled along with their nests. And year round, we get birds that look like they’ve been knifed after becoming entangled in glass-coated kite string.”

Wildlife Rescue offers a much-needed service to Delhi’s raptors, especially black kites, and to several migratory bird species as well. In addition, the brothers’ observations about bird behavior and environmental conditions, as well as their vast knowledge about avian surgery and treatment innovations, are helping inform avian rescue and rehabilitation protocols in the city and beyond.

BLACK KITES ARE BELIEVED TO be the world’s most abundant species of Accipitridae — birds of prey with hooked bills and a wide range of prey. Researchers estimate that Delhi has the world’s highest, and most stable, concentration of the black kites, despite the ongoing decline in the city’s green cover. A 2019 study found an average of 19.02 breeding pairs of black kites per square kilometer in Delhi. Shehzad hazards that, between resident birds and visitors from neighboring states, the city usually has over 200,000 black kites. Research shows these birds actively choose to live near humans, benefiting from a lack of predators and the availability of small prey, such as rodents and pigeons, as well as rubbish, carrion, and the remains from the city’s slaughterhouses.

Black kites, to an extent, play the role of scavengers in this city, where vultures have become functionally extinct. It’s not unusual to spot hundreds of kites flying over the city’s sprawling, 70-acre Ghazipur landfill. In Muslim neighborhoods, the kites are fed pieces of meat tossed to them by residents for whom kite-feeding is a centuries-old ritual. (The traditional belief is that along with the meat, the birds also eat the sins of the feeder.) But their proximity to humans — and their swiftly deteriorating environment — pose several threats to these raptors and are the main reasons why many of them end up at Wildlife Rescue.

At the clinic’s the triage area — whose chipped blue walls are bare save for a framed 2017 New York Times article about the brothers and a whiteboard with details of all the present patients — Saud compulsively wipes down a steel table as he writes notes about each bird in a battered old register. It seems futile, as every passing vehicle raises a flurry of dust that coats the table again. My senses are assailed by the stench of raw meat and a high-pitched whinnying emanating from the perforated cartons containing injured and sick birds.

Employee Salik Rehman walks in carrying more such cartons. The 28-year-old used to volunteer at Wildlife Rescue before joining the brothers at the hospital fulltime in 2017.

“How many?” Saud asks laconically. “Fourteen,” Rehman replies, “including a barn owl.” The hospital receives, on average, 10 to 11 birds daily, though the number rises to over 40 in the months of July and August, when artificial-kite flying peaks around India’s Independence Day, August 15.

The majority of birds Wildlife Rescue receives are injured by manjha, string coated in ground-up glass or metal for use in competitive kite flying, a popular sport in India. These strings were typically made of cotton, but about a decade ago, a synthetic version became more popular, as it allowed kite fliers to easily cut competitor’s strings. The string has proved fatal for motorcyclists, rickshaw drivers, young children, and flying birds. India’s National Green Tribunal banned its use in 2017, but Shehzad says they continue to treat birds injured by it every single day. Half of them do not make it. (Cotton manjha use is still legal, though it also causes nasty injuries to birds.)

Rehman takes out the first patient, a black kite with a torn wing. He weighs it, and then places the bird on a steel table. Eyes glazed in pain, the bird feebly attempts to peck at Saud’s gloved fingers as he gently cleanses the wound and pulls out a bloodstained fragment of kite string. “There’s been too much blood loss,” he says, as he applies antiseptic ointment on the wound. “We’ll stabilize it with antibiotics and painkillers before our vet, who comes twice a week, stitches up the wing in a few days. I think it’s going to survive.” Rehman caresses the bird’s head while Saud bandages the wing. Then he pries open its beak and drops the medicine into its mouth. Next up is another black kite, its broken wing almost exactly the same as the previous patient. Then another, and then another.

In Wildlife Rescue’s operation theater, some of the best protocols for avian surgeries are being developed.

After an hour of administering first aid, Saud straightens his back. More than half of today’s new patients, all in varying states of distress, still need attention. He looks at the growing pile of bloodied feathers and kite string in the dustbin. “Spring is here,” he says, “that’s why more people are flying kites right now.”

Days later, I meet Rehman at the Charity Bird Hospital, where he is gathering all the carnivorous birds that have been brought in. Attached to the popular Digambar Jain Lal temple, about seven miles from Wazirabad, the hospital receives over 100 injured birds daily and hands over all the meat- and fish-eating species to Wildlife Rescue.

Rehman coaxes an injured spotted owlet into a cardboard box. “Some consider owls to be inauspicious, others sacrifice them on Diwali [the annual festival of lights],” he says, gently lifting it up. Over the next half an hour, he puts six black kites, including two extremely agitated ones, into separate boxes. “Usually, bird hospitals allow their broken wings to heal on their own. But such birds will never be able to fly,” he tells me. “At Wildlife Rescue, our aim is not just to keep them alive, but to ensure they fly normally again. Else they won’t survive in the wild.”

IN THE SPARSE BUT SPOTLESS ROOM in the basement that functions as Wildlife Rescue’s operation theater, some of the best protocols for avian surgeries are being developed, all based on the clinic’s extensive work with black kites. These inform the life-saving treatment of other, more endangered species of birds.

“The US has some of the best rescue and rehabilitation facilities for birds, and I’ve learnt many ground-breaking techniques in the courses I’ve attended there,” Shehzad says. The last training he underwent was from International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council in the United States. There are two protocols Wildlife Rescue has developed that he is especially proud of. “We’ve been very successful in instantly rehydrating and reviving heat-stressed birds with very commonly available salts,” he says. “The standard procedure is to rehydrate them orally; we have been able to use injections that have an instantaneous effect.”

The clinic has also pioneered feather grafting for birds with kite string injuries. “We harvest the feathers from dead birds and graft them on the wing stubs of injured birds,” Shehzad says. “The technique has been a 100 percent successful.”

Vivek Menon, executive director of Wildlife Trust of India, a conservation group that runs India’s first wild-animal rescue and rehabilitation facility in Kaziranga National Park in the northeastern state of Assam, says that this wing-grafting innovation has great potential. “The world over, many new protocols are developed and honed in zoos which treat common species,” he points out. “Wildlife Rescue is doing exactly this.”

“I feel amazed that global audiences are finding our lives so interesting. But the question is, now what?”

In 2022, Wildlife Rescue’s life and work was featured in All That Breathes, a poignant documentary that won over 24 awards in international film festivals, including Cannes, and was a top contender for this year’s Oscars. Thanks to the film, Rehman and the two brothers have also become regulars on the festival circuit this year.

“I feel amazed that global audiences are finding our lives so interesting,” Shehzad says. “But the question is, now what?”

While the film has brought them recognition (and some financial assistance from the producers), it has not translated into donations. In 2022, the clinic’s annual expenditure was USD $30,000. Shehzad would like to expand their facilities, hire more staff and have them, especially young Rehman, trained as well. “We also urgently need a bird ambulance,” he says. “This would help prevent so many fatalities because of delayed care.” However, all such plans require funding.

Since the pandemic, their business, too, has been running at a loss. “Around us, many family-run manufacturing businesses have downed shutters,” Shehzad says. Added to this is the daily stress of too many patients and too little manpower or infrastructure to tend to them.

Moreover, their critics question the need to spend time and resources saving one of the world’s most populous species of raptors — when a multitude of more endangered species could benefit from the attention.

Conservationists, perhaps frustrated by the speed with which wild habitats are deteriorating, tend to dismiss animal welfare as having a miniscule impact on the conservation of wildlife as a whole. Surya Prakash, wildlife researcher and retired professor from Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Life Sciences, has watched some of the capital’s most prolific birding spots being swallowed up by development. “Rescuing injured birds or animals is wonderful from an ethical or religious perspective,” he says, “but for conservationists, restoring landscapes that support a diversity of species has more value.”

However, as Menon sees it, “at the end of the day, every life matters — and can teach us a little more about the natural world.”

Indeed, Wildlife Rescue offers invaluable insights into the behavior, rescue, and rehabilitation of raptors. Shehzad says that he is amazed at the ways in which black kites continually adapt to humans.

“For instance, I began noticing cigarette butts in their enclosure on the terrace some time back,” he says. “They were using the tobacco in the butts to repel pests!” Over the years, the brothers have observed the significant scavenging services that black kites perform around Delhi’s landfills and meat markets. He estimates that there are over 10,000 black kites in the Ghazipur landfill alone, often called Asia’s largest garbage mountain, next to a bustling meat and fish market. “Human activity has generated this mountain of waste,” he says. “I can’t even imagine how large it would be if it weren’t for these birds.”

SHEHZAD AND SAUD ARE, in fact, keenly aware of the importance of conservation. They have long noticed that a large percentage of bird injuries are caused by anthropogenic activities and the general degradation of the capital’s wild spaces, especially along the Yamuna floodplain. At the Jain hospital, for instance, the wards are full of fledglings from broken nests, along with pigeons and doves — injured during traditional bird races and fights organized in Old Delhi — and budgerigars, canaries, and other exotics rescued from the bird market.

The brothers constantly advocate for restoring the capital’s two major natural features — the Yamuna River and the 35-km-long Delhi Ridge, which is the northern extension of the Aravalli mountains. The Ridge, which is known as the city’s “lungs,” along with the Yamuna, makes up the catchment that is crucial for Delhi’s water supply, and therefore, its existence. But in 1947, as the city began to expand after independence, many of the Ridge forests began to disappear. By the 1990s less than 5 percent of the city had green cover left, and the Yamuna had become little more than a sewage canal full of untreated waste and industrial effluent. The impact on local biodiversity was severe, damaging green areas that house hundreds of native plant and animal species, including a staggering diversity of bird species, 466 by some counts.

Fortunately, over the past two decades, several conservation projects, including the creation of six “biodiversity parks,” have rewilded forests and wetlands around Delhi. According to the 2021 India State Forest Report, the city’s green cover has gradually begun growing again, from 10.2 percent in 2001 to an incredible 23.06 percent in 2021. Conservation experts have observed a consequential uptick in avian diversity and numbers. Prakash, along with Bombay Natural History Society’s Sohail Madan, studied avian populations in Delhi’s only wildlife sanctuary, Asola Bhatti, and recorded 250 bird species there, including 118 migratory ones. Their findings were published by the Wildlife Institute of India this past February.

The Wildlife Rescue team, working with the city’s forest department, has released dozens of rescued birds into these reserves, including several species of waterbirds, Egyptian vultures, and other endangered species. “Their work with black kites is honing skills needed to rescue, rehab, and release more endangered species, giving it value from the conservation point of view as well,” Madan says.

ON A SUNNY SPRING MORNING, Rehman cleans the largest enclosure on Wildlife Rescue’s terrace with a high-pressure pipe. A black kite is perched on the partly open roof, ready to take off. In the sea of black plumage, two Egyptian vultures, their plumage a snowy white, stand out. “This indicates their good health, and that our tweaks with their diet have been successful,” Saud says. “Earlier we used to feed them waste scraps from the local butcher, but now we’ve switched to more nutritious cuts of meat.”

“Animal welfare is like a drug,” Saud muses. “I get such a kick out of saving every life that working with these birds has become a compulsion over everything else.”

Balancing family life, business, and birds is “a constant struggle,” Shehzad adds. “My wife has lost count of the number of times I’ve forgotten to bring home vegetables for dinner, missed visiting relatives on special occasions, and more. We want to spend more time with our children and families, but there don’t seem to be enough hours in the day!” He now works full time on Wildlife Rescue, spending up to 12 hours a day writing grant proposals, studying new avian surgery protocols online, raising funds from individual donors, and more.

“We often talk about what will happen when one of us dies,” Shehzad says. “Both of us agree that going at it all alone will be too hard, and that the surviving brother will probably shut down Wildlife Rescue.” Just then, hope appears in the form of Saud’s 15-month-old daughter Sara, whose first few words included ‘oo’ (owl) and ‘poo’ (parakeet). Shehzad’s five-year-old daughter also loves birds and loves to take care of them, especially the fledglings. The brothers hope that the future of Wildlife Rescue could lie with them.

On the terrace, Rehman watches as a black kite, healed from its horrific manjha-inflicted injuries, takes tentative flight. “When I see our patients fly, it makes me believe that it’s all been worth it,” he says. “I just want to feel this feeling again and again.”