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The grieving brothers rescuing black kites from Delhi’s deathly skies

The brothers tend to 2000 injured birds that fall from the skies every year - Dogwoof
The brothers tend to 2000 injured birds that fall from the skies every year - Dogwoof

Where London has its pigeons, Delhi has its black kites. Hundreds of thousands of the scavenging birds spiral over the skyline, stalking butchery rows and municipal dumps and diving down for scraps of meat.

They are a fixture of the city, loved by some and overlooked by many. But over recent months as Delhi endured record-breaking 49.2C heat, a disturbing phenomenon started to occur: the birds were falling from the sky in record numbers.

Choking on a thick blanket of heat and toxic smog, even such hardy aeronauts as the black kite could no longer cope in the broiling city.

The birds mainly suffer from severe dehydration, explains Nadeem Shehzad, 45, who alongside his his 41-year-old brother Mohammad Saud is the co-founder of a charity, Wildlife Rescue, which rehabilitates injured birds of prey and re-releases them into the city. Often when they discover birds, he says, they are literally gasping for air.

Autumn offers little respite. At this time of year the air pollution is at its very worst when farmers in the agricultural provinces surrounding Delhi burn their fields following the end of the harvest. Nadeem, who is married with a five-year-old daughter, says when he checks the air quality app on his smartphone it advises him to wear a respirator mask. “It is unbelievably high,” he says, grimly. “It is said everyone in Delhi smokes five cigarettes a day; even a new-born baby.”

Delhi's skies swarm with black kites
Delhi's skies swarm with black kites

As well as rising pollution and record heat, the birds must also navigate the menace of the famous kites flown from Delhi’s rooftops – a tradition which dates back centuries but can be lethal for the city’s avian inhabitants.

The dehydrated birds are given water and hand-fed scraps of meat (black kites gobble up around 50-60g in a single day) and are left to recuperate in cardboard boxes. As for those whose wings have been torn by the strings of human kites, the brothers will perform painstaking and highly technical operations upon damaged muscles and tendons before wrapping the birds in gauze bandages.

Every year, Nadeem says, they are being presented with more cases but in 2022, as five separate heatwaves caused unprecedented temperatures, the number of stricken birds has rocketed by 25 per cent. Theirs is a Sisyphean task. No sooner can they heal and release a bird back into the wild then dozens more will fall from the sky. Their caseload now well exceeds 2,000 birds a year. The day before we speak, Nadeem says, the brothers released two black kites and were presented with another nine requiring their attention.

But even as so many of Delhi's human population chokes in the toxic air, the brothers insist saving the scavengers in their midst is a vital task. “It doesn’t matter to us how important or glamorous the kites are we just wanted to help them,” Nadeem says. “It is a form of life which feels pain and needs help and people are the ones creating problems for them.”

Their efforts to help the birds survive the polluted city was one of the unlikely critical hits in the 2022 London Film Festival. Directed by fellow Delhi resident Shaunak Sen on a relatively shoestring budget, the documentary titled All That Breathes is already a Grand Jury Prize winner at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival and won the Golden Eye documentary award at Cannes earlier this year. It is now showing on Sky Documentaries.

The film depicts humans and animals jostling for space in one of the world’s most polluted and congested mega-cities. And in documenting the work of the two brothers who have devoted their lives to rescuing everything from squirrels to baby rats to vultures and kites, it is a story of hope amid the ecological catastrophe slowly engulfing the city (and many others like it). “Truly they work miracles every day,” says director Shaunak Sen of the two brothers.

The pair grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Old Delhi, the bustling heart of the city. From a young age they took a menagerie of wounded birds into their home. At first the birds would be housed on a roof terrace but later they migrated into their bedroom. Nadeem says he would often wake up with an owl perched on his chest.

The first wounded black kite they encountered was in 1995, lying in the street outside their home. The brothers tried a number of veterinary clinics but all refused citing their Hindu faith and a vegetarian diet meaning they were unable to assist the meat-eating black kites.

Eventually defeated, they put the bird back where they found it and the following morning it had disappeared, presumed dead. However that moment planted the seed for what would later become the defining mission of their lives: caring for the unwanted scavengers of the city.

As muslims, the brothers have no religious issues with meat-eating animals (indeed some of Delhi’s muslim population consider it good fortune to feed the kites). Nor does the often maligned reputation of so-called synanthropes – species that have adapted to live alongside humans – trouble them. “It doesn’t matter what the animal is,” Nadeem says. “What matters is it breathes – just like us.”

We are talking via Zoom from the dedicated clinic the brothers opened year or so ago and where they work alongside a team of three other staff. The operation runs on a shoestring and is funded entirely by donors. Prior to that they were operating on birds in the cramped basement of their home.

The black kites may have damaged muscles or tendons
The black kites may have damaged muscles or tendons

Both brothers left school to work in their father’s business (manufacturing parts for scooters) and have no formal veterinary training. Without the internet growing up, they initially developed their surgical skills through men’s fitness magazines and whatever biology books they could find.

Over the decades their passion has spiralled into what both freely admit is an often unhealthy obsession. “When we were kids we devoted all our time to it and slowly we lost all our social life,” Nadeem says. “People gave up on us.”

In their early 30s after missing countless family funerals and weddings the brothers had a sudden realisation that they could no longer continue such antisocial lives. “We thought about it and decided if we keep missing everything then nobody will be there for us,” Nadeem says.

Marriage and fatherhood has also slightly tempered their obsessive working patterns. As well as Nadeem’s daughter, Mohammad has two children aged seven and 11 months old. Even if the brothers still work through the night they insist they make more time for their families. It helps, they add, that their wives are animal lovers too.

Growing up they say their parents were similarly supportive of their endeavours, especially their mother, Najma Sultana, who died aged 63 in 2017 after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Mohammad has kept a lock of her hair alongside a kite feather which he plans to be buried with “One day she told us the life you are living is the dream of mine,” he says.

During filming the director Shaunak Sen also unexpectedly lost his father following a stroke at the age of 66 (the documentary is dedicated to his memory).  “It was very unexpected and very sad,” he says.

The film, he acknowledges, became more sombre as a result but he and the brothers were also able to connect on a deeper level as they processed their grief.

The brothers must perform complicated operations on the fallen kites
The brothers must perform complicated operations on the fallen kites

Sen is a bookish 35-year-old who has recently completed a PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. All That Breathes is only his second feature-length documentary and he admits he has been left slightly stunned by its success. Despite suddenly hitting the mainstream he insists he is not attracted by the riches on offer in Bollywood. “My world is so far away from that,” he says. “My natural habitat has always been the reading room of a library and that is what I enjoy the most.”

It was while undertaking a fellowship at Cambridge University in 2018 that he first became interested in the overlapping and conflicting worlds of birds and humans, specifically through reading J. A Baker’s famous 1967 book, The Peregrine, where the author studied peregrine falcons in his native Essex at a time when the agricultural pesticide DDT was decimating populations.

Sen also emphasises how he wants his film to be more than a “story of good people doing sweet things”. The story of the kites is interspersed with lingering and tender shots of rats (over successive nights of filming Sen says the crew got used to rodents scuttling over their feet), mosquitos, snails and a turtle creeping over a rubbish bag. It all serves to underline the point that regardless of the ecological catastrophe in our cities being caused by humans, we are still not alone.

And of course above it all there are the kites, a creature Sen describes as “lazy black dots in the skies”.

Regardless of the plaudits now coming his way, he insists his documentary had one simple ambition. “I hope people will watch the film and look up,” he says. “That gesture would be enough.”


 All That Breathes is on Sky Documentaries from February 8