Chinar: The Little Warbler Who Fell From a Himalayan Hailstorm

Chinar: The Little Warbler Who Fell From a Himalayan Hailstorm

**Dachigam National Park, Kashmir – November 2025**  
*By Ankul*
My name is Ankul. I’m 29, born and raised in Srinagar, and for the last five years I’ve been volunteering with Kashmir Bird Rescue, a tiny outfit run by five mad people who believe even a sparrow deserves a second chance.

On 14 November 2025, Kashmir got hit by the worst unseasonal hailstorm anyone can remember. Golf-ball-sized ice fell for forty minutes straight. The chinar leaves that had just turned their perfect autumn red were shredded overnight. Power lines snapped. And somewhere up in Harwan, on the road that climbs toward Dara, a tiny migrant from another continent took the full force of it.

A shepherd named Ghulam Hassan found her the next morning, half-buried under wet golden leaves beside an ancient chinar tree. She was breathing, but only just. He wrapped her in the corner of his pheran and carried her down the mountain on foot because the roads were blocked with fallen walnuts and branches.

That’s how she reached us at 11 a.m., wrapped in wool that smelled of woodsmoke and sheep.

She was a female Black-and-white Warbler — a bird that should never be in Kashmir. These little ladder-backed creatures breed in the boreal forests of Canada and the northern United States, then fly down the Atlantic coast to winter in Cuba, Jamaica, or northern South America. Yet every few years one gets caught in a rogue jet stream and ends up thousands of kilometres off course. Birders call them mega-rarities. The bird herself probably called it the worst week of her life.

We named her Chinar, because that’s where she fell, and because those fiery leaves were the last thing she saw before the sky turned white with ice.

Day 1 – Critical  
She weighed 9.8 grams — less than a tablespoon of rice. Body cold, eyes glued shut with stress crust, one wing hanging like a broken umbrella. We slipped her into a warmed woollen sock, placed a hot-water bottle against the cage, and dripped glucose water on the side of her beak every twenty minutes. I slept on the floor next to her that night, listening to the tiniest wheeze in the dark.

Day 3 – First Spark  
She opened her eyes. Then she lifted her head and took a mashed boiled-egg mixture from the tip of a paintbrush. When I whispered “shhh, bas thodi der aur” (just a little longer), she gave the faintest tail flick — the bird version of “I heard you.”

Day 7 – Personality  
Black-and-white Warblers don’t hop like sparrows; they creep along trunks like miniature woodpeckers. We put a rough deodar branch in her cage and she immediately started ladder-backing up and down it, inspecting every crack for imaginary ants. She began recognising voices. When I walked in she’d give a soft “pink!” — the contact call they use in the forests of Quebec. Here it was echoing off our tin roof in Dachigam.

Day 12 – Flight Cage on the Ridge  
We moved her to the big soft-net aviary behind the centre, the one that looks out over the Sindh River toward Mahadev Peak. The first flight was a disaster — she clipped the netting and tumbled. The second was three metres. By evening she was doing perfect figure-eights between the apple trees, stripes flashing black-white-black-white against the snow-dusted ridges.

Day 18 – Release  
18 November 2025. The sky was that impossible Kashmiri blue you only get after snow. The chinar trees were bare now, but the ground was still carpeted gold.

I carried her cage up the forest trail to the exact tree where Ghulam Hassan had found her. A small group gathered — the shepherd, two forest guards, my teammate Aisha who had stayed up every night feeding Chinar, and a bunch of local kids who had started calling her “Chinar Miss.”

I opened the door.

She sat on the perch for a long thirty seconds, head swivelling, taking in the mountains she was never meant to see. Then she launched — straight, strong, climbing higher and higher until she was just a flickering stripe against the white face of Mahadev. The kids started cheering. Ghulam Hassan wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his pheran and said, “Mashallah, she remembered the way home.”

She’s out there now, somewhere over Central Asia, trying to correct a navigation error that cost her a month and nearly her life.
And every autumn, when the chinar leaves turn red again, I’ll walk under that same tree and listen for the soft “pink!” that might just be her, passing through one last time.

If you’re in Kashmir and the weather turns cruel, keep your eyes on the ground.  
A tiny warrior wearing zebra stripes might need you to be her second chance.

— Ankul  
Protector from Uniform 
Srinagar, Kashmir  
November 2025

(If you ever find a stunned bird, don’t give it bread or milk. Warmth, quiet, and a shallow lid of water are the first gifts. Then call the nearest wildlife rehabber. Even one life is a whole world saved.)

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