Tucked into the old heart of Kabul, a short walk from the spice sellers of the Pul-e Khishti bazaar, runs a narrow lane that is easier to find by ear than by map. Finches and larks trill from stacked cages, pigeons coo in little wire aviaries and partridges call from bell-shaped wicker cages. This is Ka Farushi, Kabul’s bird market: a row of small, mud-walled shops where birds are bought, sold, compared and admired, and where an old Afghan custom lives on in the middle of the city.
A lane named for hay
The market’s name is a small history lesson. In Dari, kah means hay or straw and farushi means selling, and the alley was once a place where horse feed was bought and sold. One local account, reported by Amu TV, links the name to the reign of Timur Shah Durrani, when the lane served as a hub for trading straw and grass and for keeping animals. In time the fodder dealers gave way to bird sellers, but the old name stayed.
Visitors describe a medieval-feeling alleyway with a few smaller lanes branching off it. The shops are tiny, their fronts festooned with cages, and the street is often crowded. Most customers are men, though women shop here too, stopping to inspect a bird, bargain with a shopkeeper or pick up seed and other supplies.
Cages, songs and seed
Each kind of bird has its own kind of home. Fighting cocks and partridges sit in bell-shaped wicker cages, finches, larks and canaries hop about in smaller cages, and pigeons are kept in wire aviaries. Traders who spoke to Reuters described caring for their birds almost as members of the family.
In 2006 a team from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), led by the wildlife veterinarian Stéphane Ostrowski, made a careful survey of the market. In August they counted 48 shops selling birds. Pigeons, bred in captivity and sold in many breeds, were the most common birds overall. Most are kept for display, and a handful of local fanciers buy them for racing.
Songbirds were everywhere, and roughly nine in ten had been caught in the wild. Three species made up the bulk: the goldfinch, the calandra lark and the red-fronted serin, all common breeding birds in Afghanistan. The goldfinches on sale that summer belonged to a subspecies known to breed in Afghanistan and eastern Iran. Eastern rock nuthatches, valued for their singing, were offered in small numbers, while canaries, either bred in Afghanistan or imported from Iran, Germany or Poland, were sold in only a few shops.
A bird’s price depends on its voice. A proven singer is usually given a cage of its own and is always relatively expensive, while young or untested birds are kept together in flocks and sold cheaply.
The prized partridge
Of all the birds in Ka Farushi, few are as cherished as the chukar partridge, kabk in Dari. It is an elegant reddish-grey bird with a red beak, a black band running across the eyes and around the throat, and black stripes along its sides. Some chukars are kept as pets and some are admired for their calls, but above all they are bred for fighting.
The WCS surveys found that chukars and quails were the only two species sold as fighting birds. Male chukars were kept in individual cages and, depending on their performance, could fetch as much as 200 US dollars in 2006, which the researchers reckoned equal to about three months’ salary for a government official. Quails, by contrast, were kept in shared cages holding anywhere from five to fifty birds.
Fighting cocks are the costliest birds in the lane. In 2018 Reuters reported that the best cocks, brought from northern Afghanistan, could sell for up to one million afghanis, then about 14,000 US dollars. An elderly trader told the agency he had kept partridges for sixty years, and a fighting-cock seller summed up the spirit of the place: “In Afghanistan, it’s a passion to keep birds.”
A market that changes with the seasons
Ka Farushi is not the same in every month. When the WCS team returned on 20 December 2006 it was snowing, and only 38 shops were open; the others had closed because of the weather or the late hour. The mix of birds had shifted too. Calandra larks were about two and a half times as numerous as in summer and red-fronted serins about seven times, while quails, which visit Afghanistan in summer, had fallen sharply.
Most of the goldfinches on sale in winter no longer belonged to the local subspecies, and winter visitors such as bramblings had appeared in the cages. The researchers linked the rise in songbirds to winter trapping: in Ghazni province, a colleague told them, catching songbirds is a typical winter pastime, when there is less work to do on the farms.
Fridays bring bigger crowds. Alongside the birds, the market offers pottery, traditional medicines and small places to eat, and many visitors come simply to look at the birds, listen and swap stories.
An old tradition, and a closer look
Keeping songbirds is an old Afghan tradition. Writers on the market point out that birds appear in the Qur’an, and that the Prophet Solomon is said to have used birds as special messengers. For many keepers the pleasure is personal: one Kabul pigeon fancier with about fifty birds told Reuters that busying himself with them at home kept him happy and refreshed.
The researchers also looked closely at the birds’ welfare. Many wild-caught birds were kept in crowded cages and were in medium to poor condition, and the team recommended regular visits to watch for disease and for any threatened species. All the wild species they recorded were listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, though their status in the region is poorly known.
That is part of what makes the lane remarkable. Because birds reach Ka Farushi from all over the country and throughout the year, this one crowded alley offers a window onto Afghanistan’s birdlife as well as onto a pastime that Kabul has loved for generations.
