Where your gift goes

Wildlife Rescue, Wazirabad, Delhi

The largest raptor rescue facility in the world, by the number of birds of prey it receives each year. Founded by two brothers who started with a single injured Black Kite and a family home.

40,000+

Birds received since 2010

Wildlife Rescue crossed forty thousand cases in June 2026.

4,184

Birds treated in 2025 alone

Their busiest year on record, and the numbers keep climbing.

138

Distinct species treated

From Black Kites to Endangered Egyptian Vultures.

40%

Of documented injuries are from manja

Glass-coated kite string that cuts wings to the bone.

How it started

A bird nobody would take.

In the early 1990s, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud — brothers in Delhi — found an injured Black Kite and carried it to a bird hospital. They were turned away. The hospital was vegetarian and did not treat raptors, which eat meat.

So they treated it themselves. Then the next one, and the one after that, out of their own home, funded by the small soap-dispenser business they ran to pay for it. They taught themselves avian anatomy, surgery and anaesthesia largely from books and repetition.

Wildlife Rescue was formally registered under the Indian Trusts Act in 2010. The case register has been kept by hand ever since — every bird, numbered in sequence.

One should not differentiate between the birds and oneself. Life itself is a kinship — we are all a community of air.
Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud

The signature injury

Manja

Kite-flying is a Delhi institution. The string used for it — manja — is often coated in powdered glass so that flyers can cut each other’s lines. Strung invisibly across the sky, it does the same thing to birds.

A manja strike catches the leading edge of the wing. It cuts through skin, then through the propatagial tendon that holds the wing’s leading membrane taut, then into muscle and nerve. In severe cases it reaches bone.

About 40% of documented injuries at the clinic are manja wounds. It is not seasonal in the way people assume — it happens all year, and spikes around the kite-flying festivals.

Repairing it means rebuilding every severed layer, in order, and then proving the wing works before the bird is released. That is the technique the clinic spent years developing.

Inside the facility

A working hospital, not a shelter.

Digital radiography, gas anaesthesia, a diagnostic laboratory, an ultrasonic bone cutter, surgical laser, intensive care and large flight aviaries — assembled over three decades, largely from donations.

Digital X-ray with DR detector in use at the clinic — Digital radiography — fractures mapped before surgery.

A bandaged Black Kite recovering beside the gas anaesthesia machine — Coming round after surgery, bandaged and logged by case number.

Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud presenting stage one of the repair, dorsal and ventral views on screen — Stage one, presented to the field: the skin layer sutured, dorsal and ventral.

Enclosures at the facility with recovering raptors perched at the far end — Enclosures and aviaries, where birds are conditioned before release.

A Spotted Owlet chick in care — Orphan season. Chicks arrive by the hundred each summer.

Six Barn Owls ready for release — Six Barn Owls, the morning of their release.

Who arrives

138 species, and counting.

Black Kites make up roughly 82% of intake — Delhi holds one of the densest populations of them on earth. The remainder spans owls, falcons, eagles, vultures, storks and herons.

Steppe Eagle

Endangered

Egyptian Vulture

Endangered

Peregrine Falcon

Indian Scops Owl

Black-Eared Kite

Spotted Owlet

Our role

What an American charity can usefully do.

Consumables that never stop

Antibiotics, analgesia, fluids, sutures, dressings, anaesthetic gas and food. Unglamorous, constant, and the first thing to run short.

Equipment and its upkeep

Imaging, surgical and laboratory equipment has to be bought, serviced and eventually replaced. Capital gifts are hard to raise locally.

The research they give away

Documenting outcomes and presenting technique at professional symposia costs money and earns none. It is also how one clinic's knowledge reaches many.

Fund this clinic Visit Wildlife Rescue’s own site