Recently, on its Instagram page, Urbaser Sumeet raised a hymn of praise to a conservancy worker within its fold. Not a verse in that praise struck a superfluous note. Udaykumar, the conservancy worker, rescued an injured bird, pulling it out of the jaws of death after it had come between the jaws of a canine. While Udaykumar was on his beat, clearing garbage on Oliver Road in Zone 9, a resident told him about a bird bitten by a dog and cowering in the neighbouring house. The reel shows Udaykumar narrating the sequence of events that led to the bird’s recovery: how he took the bird, the injury from the bite on the side of its neck evident, to a vet, informed his office and finally, handed the bird over to the forest department. If it had not been a Chestnut winged cuckoo (CWC), the story would have ended then and there as a heart-warming act of kindness. No sequel to it.
The sight of this CWC in the reel held gently by Udaykumar, with bare hands and with gloved hands could not but put this writer in mind of an observation ornithologist V. Santharam had made in the context of a discussion about the CWC five years ago.
He had made the observation in an article in The Hindu titled, “How much of a passage migrant is the Chestnut winged cuckoo?” (dated November 22, 2020).. He recalled two instances of rescuing a Crested winged cuckoo in the Santhome of the 1980s when he was a resident of the neighbourhood. On both occasions, the CWC had flown into a house, and crows had launched into it. In one of those two instances, it had “crash-landed” next door in Santharam’s neighbour’s house.
