Humble pigeon vs famed hawk of badshahs & Batalvi

Chandigarh: The common, pugnacious and agile hawk, the Shikra, is likened as the winged ‘leopard’ of bungalow gardens because of its shikari prowess and reliance on trees. But the similarity does not end here. The leopard seldom downs bigger prey, like an adult sambar leaving them for the tiger. The Shikra, too, finds it difficult to hunt down from an over-abundance of urban pigeons, leaving them to larger-sized but uncommon Peregrine/Shaheen falcons and Eurasian sparrowhawks.
A number of field observations and photographs of Shikra and its prey from the Tricity have brought to light its standard, “manageable” prey menu: bulbuls, garden lizards, squirrels, sparrow chicks etc but kills of a pigeon are seldom reported. A recent, chance photograph of a Shikra on a pigeon kill from a Sector 18 B bungalow is more the exception than the norm for a predator immortalised by the poetic analogies of Shiv Batalvi and by falconers of erstwhile royals. The pigeon killed by the Shikra in Sector 18 B was not an adult but a fledgling nearing the stage of its maiden flight.
While Batalvi subtly deployed the ruthless qualities of the Shikra to spin a poetry of crushed love and an innocent, yearning heart carved out by a blood-stained beak, court falconers of the maharajas would train Shikras as the raptor was easily schooled and would hunt down food for the larger royal falcons, eagles and goshawks. A trained and large female Shikra — as compared to its wilderness state where it prefers small, manageable quarry — was even taught to strike at prey such as a young peacock and Egyptian vulture by falconers of repute as the late RS Dharmakumarsinhji of Bhavnagar state. The etymology of the common name, Shikra, derived from “Persian via Urdu, in Hindi, shikari denotes ‘hunter’”, as explained by the reputed raptor expert and billionaire Godrej heir, Rishad Naoroji.
“If a Shikra is able to kill a pigeon, which is seldom the case, it is likely the pigeon was a chick or the adult pigeon was wounded, sick or debilitated in some manner. Just as a leopard will hunt a fawn but dare not take on a male sambar because apart from its unmanageable size, one kick from its powerful hind leg could disable or churn the innards out of the clinging leopard,” Sarfrazuddin Malik, who works on rehabilitating wounded / sick migratory raptors and trained on these birds of prey at the Ahmedabad zoo, in California and with the hereditary Punjabi Pathan falconers of the Bhavnagar royals, told TOI.