India's Pigeon Saviors

Falak Vora bounded through a drab concrete jungle in hot pursuit of a pigeon.

She cornered the hobbled bird behind a parking lot stairwell, pounced, and handed her deftly subdued catch to an older relative. The 19-year-old architecture student fretted as she reached into a first aid kit strung around her waist. She pulled out one bottle of ointment to disinfect a gash along the bird's wing; another bottle to clot the blood.

While many of her friends were partying and flying kites during the kite festival in the Indian state of Gujarat this year, Vora was rescuing the avian victims of those friends' fancy-free follies.

Uttarayan, a harvest celebration that bids adieu to a fleeting winter in the mostly vegetarian home state of nonviolent resistance hero Mahatma Gandhi, culminated on a Tuesday and Wednesday last month in traditional fashion. Shops, schools, and businesses shut down for the two-day holiday. Gujaratis took to rooftops and terraces to party, to crank Eminem, dubstep, and Bollywood tunes, and to fly kites. Thousands and thousands of colorful kites—most of them attached to special string that can quickly turn deadly.

Most of the kites are unspectacular, each one little more than a foot wide. It's the vast numbers of them that soar over the cities throughout the state that's so striking. Each kite sells for as little as two rupees, which is less than a nickel, with string not included. Some families will go through hundreds of them each festival, each one flown in the Gujarati breeze until the line hits somebody else's and breaks. A cheer erupts from the party at the end of the unbroken string: Victory. No matter—the loser just attaches a new kite to their spool and launches anew.

Felled kites flutter from the sky, chased by grimy kids desperate to join in the fun—and to sell their finds to richer kids. It's common to see children running through traffic, jumping desperately to clutch at string that dangles from a descending kite.

The festivities don't just leave cities covered with trashed kites. They leave them draped with severed string. It hangs from buildings and power lines, sometimes with a kite still attached. It crisscrosses freeways and wraps around trees. All of this string is a problem, because much of it is embedded with invisibly tiny shards of broken glass.

The powdered glass sharpens the string and helps slash others' lines. But it also gashes wildlife, not to mention the occasional human victim.

Thousands of birds are injured every year by the sharpened strands. Cats, dogs, and bats also fall victim—as do motorcycle drivers, with some accidents proving fatal. Armies of volunteers tear through cities to rescue injured animals, responding to phone calls that are placed to hotlines. The hotlines are advertised on billboards and television. Owls, flamingoes, and egrets are among the more elegant of the avian victims; black kites and vultures the most rugged.

But the vast majority of the wounded birds are rock doves. Common, disease-spreading pigeons.

Cultures the world over consider such birds nuisances. To the volunteer rescuers, vets, and veterinary students who save pigeons' lives ever year in Gujarat, however, they are as cherished as any other species.

"Pigeons are very peaceful birds. They don't bite us," Vora said. "They know we're helping them, and they're cool with it."

Vora helped as the wound of the pigeon that she caught was doused with ointments, then gauze was wrapped around its body, demobilizing the wings. The bird was placed in a perforated plastic crate and driven to the nonprofit's control center. There, the crate was passed on to a crew of vets and vet students perched around one of five operation tables. A child's sock was placed over the pigeon's head to keep it calm during surgery.

Plastic crates piled up at the side of the room, each housing a stitched-up survivor of a run-in with kite string. The occupants would be cared for by volunteers and rehabilitated at a shelter until they were strong enough to be set free.

Everybody involved with this operation, which was staged in a Rotary Club meeting hall, was volunteering for PRAYAS Team Environment Charitable Trust, one of a handful of nonprofits that dedicates each Uttarayan to saving injured wildlife in the gritty Gujarati city of Surat.

The operation was sophisticated, with a team taking phone calls and using online software to dispatch rescuers from waiting points throughout the city. Dispatch calls are sent out through a phone app. If a bird is tangled in string on a building façade, or if it's floundering on a balcony where nobody is home, specially trained rescuers will rappel down the building to fetch it. If it's tangled in an overhead television cable, the rescuers have permission from cable companies to cut the lines. The rescuers provide first aid to the injured animals and rush them to the teams of vets for stitches, injections, mouthfuls of medicine, steel-rod implants, and other treatments.

More than 300 PRAYAS volunteers saved 326 wounded birds during the three busiest days of this year's festival. Of those, about 95 percent were pigeons. Dozens more were discovered dead or never found.

And that was just the handiwork of a single nonprofit operating in a single city. Surat is home to 6 million people—a fraction of the 60 million people living in kite festival-crazed Gujarat. Similar festivities are held in nearby states. A five-year-old girl riding at the front of her dad's motorbike was killed this year in the state of Jaipur, for example, when her throat was slit by errant kite string.

"I used to fly kites until I was 14 or 15," said Vora, whose uncle, a PRAYAS organizer, took her to the rescue center one year to show her the injured birds. "We saw the birds that were injured really bad. That's how we realized that what we did for fun was not fun for others, so we stopped. The more children are educated about this stuff, the more they realize that flying kids is not good. And if they don't want to fly kites then I think the parents will also realize."

Each year, this group and others visit schools, urging students to come join them during Uttarayan instead of flying kites. And each year, the number of volunteers swells, with some joining before their tenth birthdays. The voluntary capacity of the youngest helpers amounts to little more than excited observers, but the nonprofit's leaders would prefer to have them watching the rescues than to have them flying kites. Organizers and kids alike told us they are seeing fewer kites in the air each year, to which they credited awareness campaigns run by nonprofits and government agencies.

The struggling of Vora's pigeon in the vets' hands waned suddenly.

Something was wrong: The faces of the women caring for it grimaced in unison, though no words were spoken. Blood had stopped flowing from the wounded wing; a bad sign. The sock was removed so the pupils could be inspected. To these experienced operators, the eyes told the tale of a creature whose life was quickly dripping away.

The bird's head flopped back ominously, and the human heads that were huddled around it drooped with defeat. The lead vet held the injured bird to her ear, then shook her head, silently summoning a helper who took its limp body and deposited it in a cardboard box with others like it.

The grief around the operating table was palpable. The loss seemed to nearly bring tears to the vets' eyes. And as I watched their grief, I came closer than I ever thought possible to crying over a dead pigeon.