BENGALURU: Apart from cases of children and adults making their way to hospitals for eye injuries and noise-induced deafness, urban wildlife also fell victim to crackers during the last three days.Independent rescuer Yash rescued three mynas, one koel, one bat and one owl from different parts of the city after receiving alerts from locals about the birds being injured by crackers.
“On Sunday, a koel was found in Katriguppe, with the portion between its wing and body partially burnt and bleeding. On Monday, soon after multiple rocket shots were fired by people celebrating Deepavali in Basavanagudi, a bat fell on the ground. Its left wing was completely broken,” Yash said. The other two cases of an owl and 3 mynas were those of trauma condition.
“Trauma condition is a state where a bird is paralysed due to fear. They don’t even move from the spot to seek protection or hide in a safer place, as any healthy bird would do. The three mynas had fallen off a tree. If they were not taken to a safe place immediately, they could have succumbed to cardiac arrest,” he said and added that the mynas were neither juveniles nor adults but sub-adults.
The owl too was in trauma, having accidentally flown into a person’s house in Padmanabha Nagar. Yash took the injured birds to Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre.Jayanthi, founder and executive director of Avian and Reptile Rehabilitation Centre, said, “We got 10 cases of owls getting stranded due to the bursting of crackers in the last three days. Owls are nocturnal creatures that have acute hearing power which they rely on to hunt in the night. While flying during their hunt, the owls would have gotten scared by the loud crackers and gotten disoriented.”
“They tend to enter inaccessible places when they panic. In one such case, the owl entered an elevator and did not know how to get out. In another, a couple of juvenile owls, which were learning how to hunt, were affected by crackers. As animals get affected during Deepavali, we shifted 35 birds from our centre to a forest area beforehand,” Jayanthi added.