The Coromandel coast under threat

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. Based on the Coromandel coast at Chennai in south-eastern India, Yuvan Aves is an active naturalist and an ardent activist. Still in his twenties, he teaches outdoor classes, he campaigns and he notes down the movements and habits of invertebrates, birds and fauna in his local wetlands and littoral. All his observations and the wider thoughts on ecology that make up Intertidal are given added heft and poignancy by the searing account of his childhood which begins the book.

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His father was a philandering no-hoper whom his mother left for another man. That man was even worse. He took against the young Aves and subjected him to regular beatings, forcing him to scrape the blood from the walls when visitors were coming. Aged 16, Aves ran away, and was adopted by a residential school where he began the process of healing. Nature was his chosen cure, ‘recasting my suffering into life-driving energy’.

The greater part of Intertidal is made up of daily recordings – the ghost crabs and fiddler crabs scuttling on the foreshore, the seabirds and waders, the migration routines of the crimson rose butterflies and the tawny coster, the sweat bees and carpenter bees. There are also sights more familiar to those of us in the UK: egrets and sanderlings, plover and peregrines.

But the most abundant species of his immediate area is, according to Aves, none of these creatures. It is the IT professional. For all its biodiversity, the rich mixing of river silts and marine currents, Chennai is a swelling mass of population, commerce and industry. The air and water are made toxic by petrochemical plants.