The old emblem on the Hogg Market (New Market) building

The two Adjutant birds of the emblem were Greater Adjutants, birdwatcher and conservation worker Sujan Chatterjee said.

“These birds are scavengers. They feed on dead animals and are also in the habit of scouting for food in garbage heaps. I think they were featured in the CMC’s emblem because of their usefulness as scavengers and also because they were found in large numbers in the city,” said Chatterjee, who was one of the reviewers who helped prepare the recently published State of India’s Birds 2020 report.

The website of the International Union for Conservation of Nature says there are only between 800 and 1,200 mature Greater Adjutants across the world. The IUCN Red List classifies it as “endangered” and says “this wide-ranging and long-lived species has a very small population which is declining very rapidly”.

The old emblem featuring the birds can also be seen on two boundary walls of SS Hogg Market — one facing Finwick Baazar Street and the other facing Bertram Street.

“I have not seen the old CMC emblem in any other place in our city,” said blogger Mukherjee.

“It is obviously a very beautiful, important and historic relic. It was made very beautifully. We do not see such designs today,” said author Amit Chaudhuri, who founded the Calcutta Architectural Legacies (CAL), which works to protect the distinctive architectural legacies of the city.

An Urdu-medium school of the civic body stands next to the Alimuddin Street plot where the English-medium school is coming up.

A gate bearing the first emblem of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, which can rarely be spotted now, has been dislodged and lying on the ground in neglect on a civic plot where a school is coming up.

The emblem, which had two Adjutant birds, had been adopted in 1896 and was replaced in 1961. The birds are as rare as the first emblem, with no documented sighting in the city since the 1940s.

A number of CMC officials Metro spoke to said they were unaware that the dislodged gate bore the first emblem of the civic body.

When told about it, Avijit Mukherjee, the mayoral council member in charge of education, said: “I will ensure that the gate is not broken into smaller pieces or destroyed. We can use the gate once the school is ready.”

The iron gate had two flaps, each bearing the emblem. Residents of the neighbourhood said one of the flaps had been taken down after the CMC started constructing an English-medium school on the vacant plot on Alimuddin Street, in central Calcutta, around three months ago. The other was dislodged a fortnight ago.

No civic official could say when the gate was built. A 53-year-old resident of Alimuddin Street said he had been seeing the gate since his childhood.

Heritage enthusiast and blogger Subhadip Mukherjee, who had written about the gate, was shocked when he failed to spot it while he was crossing the stretch a few days back. “When I was again crossing the stretch on Tuesday, I noticed that the two flaps of the gate were lying on the ground a little away from where the gate stood,” said Mukherjee.

When The Telegraph visited the spot on Wednesday afternoon, the flaps were lying on the ground. One of the flaps had gathered a thick coat of dust.