The WVI contribution to Jivdaya is the first step towards filling a gap in veterinary bird expertise across the Indian continent, whose birds suffer through a lack of a distinct lack of vets able to perform bird surgery and treatment.  

  Col 1Col 2Col 3 A Yorkshire-based vet is on her way to Ahmedabad to help deal with the carnage amongst some of India’s most endangered birds caused by its annual kite festival. The city’s International Kite Festival – one of many across the western state of Gujarat - kills or maims hundreds of birds every year with harmful glass coated, and the newer razor sharp, string used by participants to try to cut opponents’ kite strings. Dr Johanna Storm, who runs a specialist avian and exotic pet clinic in West Yorkshire, will be working for Wildlife Vets International, a British charity dispatching specialist wildlife vets across the globe. WVI was asked for help by the Jivdaya Trust, an Indian veterinary charity, whose staff and volunteers struggle to deal with injuries to birds ranging from owls to waterfowl and, ironically black kites, one of the most common victims of kite flying. Johanna will be working with and training local vets, veterinary students, a few volunteer human doctors and surgeons and about 50 Trust volunteers. Johanna is in Ahmedabad from 12th to 21st January, covering the run-up to the festival and dealing with its aftermath, improving triage, treatment and surgery, aftercare and rehabilitation within the makeshift bird rescue camps set up around the city to try and cut festival death rates. Uttarayan is a day of celebration in Gujarat, traditionally welcoming summer, where all ages gather on rooftops and open spaces to fly kites from dawn to dusk. For the birds of Gujarat, many of whom are mid-migration, however, Uttarayan brings peril and carnage – many die and hundreds sustain severe, crippling injuries as they are cut by kite strings. The string also gets entangled in trees and snares and traps legs or wings of birds roosting, nesting or flying past. It can leave them hanging upside down and often dying a slow miserable death. Many species are affected, from birds of prey such as eagles and vultures to water birds such as ibis, pelican, flamingo, stork, heron, cormorant, crane, egret, duck and godwit - and other species such as dove, cuckoo, barbet, peacock and budgerigars. During the 2012 Uttarayan period, over 2,000 injured birds needed treatment by the Trust with hundreds more killed. Among them were painted storks, ducks, egrets, peacocks, black ibis, ring neck parakeets, kites, and even an eagle and a pelican. Larger birds of prey are particularly at risk, not for the want of dedication, care or facilities but because veterinary teams currently lack knowledge of the correct veterinary expertise. Indian veterinary bird expertise is mostly confined to poultry. Birds arriving at rescue points are in shock with 99% suffering partially severed wings. Even the one inch thick bone within a vulture’s wing is sliced by the newer, razor-sharp string – officially banned but still widely used. To illustrate the enormity of the veterinary problem, the Dalmatian pelican, one of the world’s largest living bird species, has a wingspan of up to 3.5m. Immense expertise is needed to repair such an injury sufficiently to enable the bird to fly again. WVI is also supplying essential equipment such as anaesthesia masks, an electronic ventilator and cohesive bandages that UK vets take for granted but unavailable in India. The charity hopes that Johanna’s training will cascade to those tackling similar problems in other major centres of kite flying across Gujarat. She will see how and where recovered birds are released and give invaluable long term care advice for those which are too badly injured to be released. The WVI contribution to Jivdaya is the first step towards filling a gap in veterinary bird expertise across the Indian continent, whose birds suffer through a lack of a distinct lack of vets able to perform bird surgery and treatment.