The Better India · 30 days ago

Pfa Wildlife Hospital in Bengaluru Is Rescuing & Treating Birds Injured by Kite Manjha on Makar Sankranti

A festival's celebration of spring becomes, for birds, a gauntlet of glass-laced thread that severs wings mid-flight-a collision between human joy and avian catastrophe that Colonel Dr Navaz Shariff refuses to accept as inevitable. At Bengaluru's PfA Wildlife Hospital, he has pioneered "imping," surgically grafting donor feathers onto wounded birds so they can reclaim the sky within 24 hours rather than languish for months waiting for nature's slower mercy. The feathers arrive from an unlikely network: schoolchildren scouring parks, volunteers mailing plumes cross-country, all building what Shariff calls a "feather bank" stored "exactly like one would store valuables." Here lies the moral knot-manjha has been banned since 2016, yet over 14,800 birds have required rescue, their suffering rendered invisible by tradition's stubborn grip and enforcement's absence. What the hospital offers isn't merely medical intervention but a question suspended in the air: whether a community will choose the harder work of protecting what flies freely above, or continue cutting it down in the name of what has always been done.