A black-headed ibis.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images
It was still dark outside when I started watering the garden in the morning. The April of 2022 was nearing its end and summer was peaking. My wife had created the garden after we came to live in our own house in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, after I had retired from police service. The garden was the apple of her eye and only after a lot of persuasion and as a concession to a senior citizen (she wasn’t yet), she had allowed me to fill in for the gardener on days he remained absent.
Water pipe in hand, I was engrossed in my task meditatively when something blackish moved in the foliage of ixora bushes. Only in the previous week, municipal road cleaning staff had spotted a panther on the road along the forest patch on the Sabarmati river bank, not far from our house. But that was not a black panther and what I had seen was about the size of a cat only.
Thus reassuring myself, I waited for the sunlight to probe further. Half-an-hour later, it was daylight. After completing my task, I set about searching for the intruder. I soon found it hidden among the red dracaena plants. It was the young of a black ibis but not too young. On seeing me, it tried to fly but could not lift itself. It just moved away. “Perhaps it is too young to fly or maybe injured,” I thought and told my wife about it. She came out and saw it. She suggested that I call the animal helpline.
From the Internet, I could find two NGOs claiming to be working for animals and birds. On the first number, nobody picked up the phone. On the second, a man said that they had stopped working for birds. So, I informed the local forest officials. They agreed to dispatch help. Meanwhile, my wife had put some water and a handful of grain for the guest. But it kept off — out of mistrust or modesty, we could not say.
An hour later, two forest staffers came. They saw the young visitor and confirmed that it was a young ibis. They tried to go nearer to examine it. But it hopped deeper inside the foliage. The two fellows conferred and concluded that the bird had got separated from its mother and asked me if there were any nests of the black ibis in the neighbourhood.
I said, “How would I know?” They ignored the question and casually surveyed the top of the nearby trees but did not find what they were looking for. I suggested that they take the bird with them and nurse it till it can fly. But they said that it would not survive without its mother and asked us to let it remain in the garden. They said that the mother would definitely come on hearing its call.
“What if she does not come? There is a stray cat around. The bird would become its prey at night if we leave it in the garden,” my wife said. They thought about it and told us to take care of it till evening after which they would let us know what to do. And they left. We also got busy in our routine.
In the afternoon, I returned to the garden to check the visitor. It was there under the red Champa tree. Thinking that, perhaps, now it would trust me, I tried to go closer. It panicked and hopped out into a clearing and after an agitated fluttering of wings flew out of the garden.
I felt bad. “Even birds want to avoid retired people,” I thought. “But how did the young fellow guess that I was a retiree,” I asked myself. A voice from inside me replied, “Who else has time to water a garden?”
satish_k_sharma@hotmail.com
Published – September 28, 2025 03:30 am IST
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