I had a big debate with Bruce about whether a painted stork could count as my third duck. On balance it has a much bigger beak and much longer legs but I reckon as far as Indian equivalents go; it’s the best I’m going to get on this adventure.

This particular massive bird was hanging upside down from a tree with it’s legs tangled in a branch. As a troop of monkeys looked on, Narender scaled the branches like a pro whilst I literally had to drag myself up a tree. I’m sure the monkeys were not the only ones who had a good laugh about it as crowd gathered round. Somehow Narender managed to balance on a branch no bigger than my wrist about 20ft about the ground, I was about the ten foot level on a much bigger platform but between us, we got the bird down like a slick tree climbing bird rescue team. Narender to me, me to a special friend on ground level. It was a four month old chick but if you stretched it out, it would be almost four foot.

The bird had a few nicks but was fine and we got it in the nick of time. Karuna have a shelter for the painted storks and fix up about 200-400 chicks each season. Those that get abandoned, fall from their nests, get blown off the trees or tangled up. The nest site for these birds is incredible – right in the middle of a village and including chicks there are approx 9000 of them. The villagers think they are lucky so put up with the deafening noise and huge amounts of bird droppings that rain from the sky!

Rest of the day – great. Couple of big interviews about the shelter animals, Adam had some fun filming us from the back of an ox cart! Easier said than done but he managed it- much better balance than my efforts climbing the tree, that’s for sure. Marc is definitely cheering up as we are getting a handle on the cases and Bruce is feeling a bit better. All in all, a winner.

In my previous blog I talked about wonderful creatures and today I spotted another: Ants! Whilst waiting for Luke to recover from his Delhi belly upstairs in the hotel there was a swarm of them devouring a butterfly. They were crawling all over it and I think attempting to carry it back to their hill. I was hoping Luke would swoop down and save the poor thing, but sadly it was already dead…

There was a great bit of surgery this morning as Luke took a horn off a buffalo.

Amazing to watch, although not for the squeamish – there was blood galore as the Indian doctor decided it was a good idea to cut down to the skull, which I’m not too sure Luke was pleased about. But when you’re in someone else’s backyard it’s pretty difficult to argue.

The highlight of the day for Adam must have been his reminiscing about school gymnastics when he balanced on two parallel metal bars to get a shot of the buffalo surgery.

Oh I forgot to mention: Luke bought his second drum of the trip so far! The street sellers love him – following him around everywhere. He couldn’t resist buying it. Obviously one drum isn’t enough…

Dr Nanderandi smiled as he casually talked me through the flank bitch spay technique today – 7 minutes later he lay down his instruments. Well, 7 minutes and 17 seconds to be precise but who’s counting 17 seconds. For those at all interested the anaesthetic was 2mg/kg xylazine IM, 0.02mg/kg atropine s/c then 5minutes later one handed catheterisation 10m/kg ketamine I/v and on a drip. No tops up needed (except for my slow coach 16minute effort which needed an extra jab) but these are a 50:50mix of 20mg/ml xylazine and 100mg/ml ketamine and given at 0.5ml/10kg. Every animal gets meloxicam and la antibiotic – one suture of silk horizontal mattress and this is removed after 5 days. They look perfect. So today I had the master class in spaying and I have loved it. This morning was an epic removal of a buffalo horn with a fracture and then this afternoon spaying. Apparently the vet working with us tomorrow is even faster. I’m out of my league with these guys.

It has been another scorcher but the monsoon is apparently on its way so we’ll see how that goes. Avian medicine isn’t a hot topic with me at the moment – a little bird I operated on died and I’m really sad about it – it just hated captivity and I think the biggest lesson I learned there was that wild birds belong free and the issue of hospitalisation is a factor I didn’t consider enough. Really disappointed and it was doing so well for the last couple of days!

The crew is all in the zone, Adam just said he feels relaxed and chilled, Bruce is feeling less melancholy and not so full of angst, Marc is apparently zooper – whatever that means.

Bring on the donkeys tomorrow!

Lots of GVs today, Marc and I paid a courtesy visit to the local chief of police armed with a tin of shortbread biscuits which went down well; so whilst permissions for town shooting were cleared at a local level, unfortunately the secret police patrolling outside the Ashram (due to high security alert from terrorist bomb threats) had other ideas so we had to cut that a bit short. Driving the truck through the town was an experience to say the least! There are no rules other than honk your horn and go for gold! Marc is immensely pleased with himself because the policeman told him how much he liked his beard and that he looked like a Hero (to my villain of course).

Marc, Adam and Nathan headed back to base after the interviews whilst I hopped on the back of Narenda’s motorbike for a trip to treat some donkeys Clementien was worried about. These animals head off into the forest each day and come laden back with huge amounts of sticks strapped on the backs. The sticks rub then raw and some were in a bad way. They weren’t exactly in the best part of town – the donkeys were being ‘hidden’ from thieves behind the cemetery, just through the rubbish tip by the open drainage to a small ‘lake’ of sewage. Grim doesn’t come close.

It was a great visit because it seemed to go down well with the community there. They are the poorest people about – they have absolutely nothing. It was nice to help out in a small way and I’m quite pleased the cameras weren;t there for this one as we could race around and get through most of the animals without me messing up any lines or having to explain everything I was doing.

None of the vets at Karuna have much donkey experience so it was nice to contribute to their amazing work. Having said that, I’m certain Clementien would have been there next week donkey vet or no donkey vet as she isn’t frightened of taking on any challenges when it comes to animal welfare!

Luke today renamed me Navender. Brilliant, because calling me Bruce in front of all and sundry isn’t confusing enough. Oh well… In retaliation I’ve renamed him Problem Child, which in a way is also a compliment because he is like a big friendly child who is going around the world solving animal problems… or something like that…

Had a great day finishing off all the stories at Karuna: the tuk tuk donkey looks healthy, the one-horned buffalo is healing well and the disabled dogs are still alive. It’s been a great start to the trip and i’m really looking forward to our ten-hour trek south to visit the next charity first thing tomorrow morning.

Bruce got upset today because I called him Navender. It’s a great name and Bruce Navender has a ring to it. I think he’s secretly getting into the whole new identity thing.

I’m getting mobbed by the beggars here, none of the crew are getting touched or grabbed whilst I seem to be quite popular on the street. No one messes with Adam, they all love Marc’s beard whilst Bruce is virtually a local now with his new name. I on the other hand must have a target on back or something. One beggar swooped up beside me in the back of a tuk tuk the other afternoon and literally lunged from the backseat onto the edge of the street, army rolled across the busy road and made a double handed grab for my legs. Pretty impressive as he did it all on his hands. The others think that, despite it being incredibly sad to see so many people like this, me being a magnet for every leper and street urchin is hilarious. I’m just not into the touching thing at all. The locals are very sceptical of the beggars here – they run the black market in loans to people who can’t borrow money from the banks and apparently some of them rent babies for 50 rupees a day to increase revenue from begging. I’m sure that isn’t the case with every baby I see strapped on the back of a poor mother and you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the plight of these little children – but when hands start going for your pockets and you get absolutely crushed by a gang of them it gets a bit overwhelming.

Today was a big livestock community day in a rural village about 30mins drive from town. Karuna did an incredible job – over 200 animals treated, and it was fantastically run by a very professional and dedicated crew.

I gave a hand (or arm) with pregnancy diagnosing a lot of the buffalo, and I just think the charity do such a great job. I may disagree with Clementien on a couple of cases in terms of keeping that going but that must not detract from the fact that she is doing fantastic work. Without her there would be no one for hundreds of kilometres and no animal gets turned away, every animal gets a chance and she is making a difference. The fact she meets every difficult decision head on is really admirable and I really support and believe in what she has done and is doing here. I definitely won’t forget this visit in a hurry and it has been a privilege to work with her and her team.

Wow! What a change of scenery. After a long car journey and some dodgy Indian food in a roadside restaurant (my stomach is still feeling blurry 24 hours later) we arrived at a mountainside paradise. And it is absolutely stunning. The charity we are filming is called IPAN (Indian Project for Animals and Nature) and it couldn’t be any more different from the Karuna Society. The dogs look healthy, the donkeys are the cutest things I’ve ever seen and the whole place has a wonderful feel to it.

But in this paradise there are huge problems: today we removed 14kgs of plastic from the stomach of a cow. And this isn’t an isolated case. Many of the livestock around the area feed on the rubbish dumped by the locals. It is a sad and depressing fact and one that I hope we will highlight to the wider public.

In other news: Marc called a cow a dog, Adam got obsessed with the idea that he had fleas, and I heard Luke singing in his hotel room (which is adjacent to mine) last night. I think he’s practicing for the release of his first album: Pet Sounds. Boom. Boom.

Epic couple of days. Ten-hour journey yesterday to the jungle. It’s really great to see Nigel (who runs the shelter) and the team again – wonderful to revisit a charity I worked at 3 years ago and very emotional to see some of the animals I rescued on my first visit. Nigel is an inspiration and it’s a privilege to be working with him again.

Removed 14-kilos of plastic from a cow’s stomach today – incredible.

Poor cows salt seek and end up on the rubbish dumps eating plastic which chokes them and slowly kills them. I was absolutely covered in rumen contents after the op – surprisingly no one would give me a hug.

I’ve been home now for just over a day and my head is still spinning from the events of the past three days. I knew that transporting an elephant 300 km wasn’t going to be easy, but what I did not expect was for a complete media circus, the most disheartening abuse of an animal and the sadness that comes from seeing the domestication of a wild animal. At one point I was seriously close to tears when the Indian mahout (elephant trainer) was whipping the poor beast with a stick. I looked up into the elephant’s eye and could see directly into its soul; beaten down and defeated the animal was begging for help. When we finally arrived at the sanctuary, which will be its new home, I was pleased to see that it has a wide-open space to live in. But my heart sinks every time I think back to the hours spent trying to get it onto the truck. It was certainly one of the cruelest things I’ve ever witnessed.

The final few days were also the longest and very tiring. Thankfully Luke nailed the ending piece to camera quite quickly and Marc’s assessment that we only needed to film “half an hour more and then home” was not as wide of the mark as it usually is. I can’t wait to see the final edit of this episode. It’s going to be immense.

The last 72 hours of the trip were immense. To briefly recap, whilst the TV crew headed back to check the footage, I did another rumenotomy on a cow and removed a staggering 20kg of plastic/money/nails which is incredible. Then Nigel and I headed off to town to get some elephant food for the following day. This was the start of an epic journey and involved an incredibly sad start to the movement of a suspected TB infected elephant.

A few dazzling stats I’ve picked up recently; India’s human population apparently accounts for a third of the world’s TB cases, a quarter of Asian elephants are in captivity and India has over 3,500 of the poor animals mostly located in temples. There is a suspected high incidence of TB amongst the captive elephant population and this is a huge risk for the people that go to worship the elephants and who receive a blessing – particularly if you are immunosuppressed. This blessing comprises a hearty pat on the head from a probing trunk and heavy inhalation of elephant breath – thus the transmission of TB.

When temple elephants get old they aren’t as useful to the temples as they can’t keep up with the work. As they are sacred the temples are in a fix because they can’t get rid of them. If they have suspected TB they can’t be kept at the temples. The animal we were involved with had been moved to a horrible pen for five months and Nigel was championing its movement to a better enclosure. Our visit was the impetus to do this as it generated good PR for the forest department but it didn’t go quite to plan.

The elephant in question had apparently killed three people but the media circus and brutality of the mahouts was something else. The forest vet in charge of proceedings was beyond useless and it was incredibly upsetting. At one point they tried to stop us filming and we refused – I didn’t fancy their chances of trying to get the camera off Adam anyway and I think they knew it. By getting totally in the way I think we did curb a bit of the brutality and I had a very ineffectual altercation with one vicious mahout who was sent away shortly afterwards by the senior mahout but it was grim. They didn’t have a ramp to load her and once they had stabbed sharp metal hooks into her mouth and jabbed her ears repeatedly as well as beaten her endlessly for about three hours, they drafted in 2 male elephants to shove her onto the lorry. Thankfully she wasn’t hurt and she did go on but we were all speechless and felt so helpless to help her. Very sad.

The actual overnight journey went well – 300km or so and we unloaded her easily – she was good as gold. Very tired at the end of it though! Her new home looked lovely so at least there was a happy ending and she’ll be much better away from her previous captors that’s for sure.

To round off 48hours on 1 hours sleep, I treated a sick temple elephant that had some abscesses and a bad foot and then we started the drive back to Bangalore. Thankfully I managed the closing lines with only about ten takes (!) and then we set off. Tyre burst on the way back so the driver and I changed that while Marc had some crisps and then the headlights wouldn’t work which was borderline the most terrifying drive of my life.

We made it to the airport, all of us exhausted, 3am check in and then back. Amazing trip, great people and challenging cases – I hope the rest are like this.