Yuvan Aves (Ithaka)
When Yuvan Aves was a boy, a search party had to be sent out after he went missing. It turned out he had been so enthralled, sitting by a pond, watching a small bird of prey leap across the water to catch hovering dragonflies that he had lost track of time.
Decades later, the adult Aves is a naturalist, author, educator and environmental activist. He still spends hours watching wild creatures, and his observations of the natural world and the ideas they spark fill his new book, Intertidal: The hidden world between land and sea.
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A diary account, recorded over two years from 2020 to 2022, it is a forensic look at the coastal city of Chennai, where he lives, on the Bay of Bengal’s Coromandel Coast in the state of Tamil Nadu.
The “intertidal” of his title is defined as “the part of the shoreline that appears during low tide and is hidden during high tide”, an area between land and ocean. Such transition zones are often populated with abundant life and diverse species. Readers are given a guided tour of beaches, rivers, wetlands and forests amid Chennai’s “utter urbanity”, where we are introduced to all kinds of residents, from clams to crimson rose butterflies.
According to nature writer Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction, Aves “is flat out and hands down the best all-round naturalist with whom I have ever spent time in the field. Fungi, protists, plants, snakes, birds, fish, insects, mollusc, lichens, humans: his knowledge spans the many kingdoms and phyla of life.”
The book is also about other in-between zones where elements meet or overlap: human and wildlife, nature and development, poetry and science, history and present, personal and political.
Aves’s writing is captivating. Here he is walking on Urur Kuppam beach: “Early April wind blows feebly from the southeast. Crows sit airily along the sterns of boats facing the sea as if there is nothing for them to do that day. Waves curl south to north, stooping into question marks.”
Aves is hopeful that more young people are moving away from values that proved ecologically disastrous
I particularly enjoyed Aves on ghost crabs, which live “on the foggy cusp of land, sea, sand and sky. They can hear and drink with the setae (hair) on their feet, speak in pincer signs, stridulations and gut rumbles. They have panoramic 360-degree vision, and the cylindrical retinas atop their eerie ghostly periscope eyes can see you coming from 50 metres away”.
They also have a very clear role: as “the principal clean-up squad and public health officers of sandy shores – beaches would be less liveable and hygienic places for numerous life forms, including us”. Their burrowing also reworks the soil, making the subsoil more inhabitable for other species.
Aves’s relationship with nature is intensely personal. Growing up with a violent, uncaring father in a low-income household, then with a stepfather who beat him so badly his blood spattered the walls, the young nature lover’s spirits would be lifted by the sight of a peregrine falcon, mongoose or snake.
Later, Aves recounts a story from when he was 14 and a wolf snake came in the house. His stepfather asked him to kill it. Instead, Aves left it safely outside in the grass, and ended up beaten until dawn, “thrashed with every piece of furniture in the house”.
Aves has continued to take a stand against violence and to defend nature in India, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental activists. He is the founder of the Palluyir Trust for Nature Education and Research, which provides outdoor, nature-based learning for the public, especially children and young people. Aves also supports environmental campaigns and conservation across Tamil Nadu, work detailed in Intertidal, including documenting the wildlife of Pulicat lagoon.
While the book’s focus is on a section of India’s east coast, its issues are global. Aves is hopeful that more young people are “moving away from the old political, religious and cultural values that have proved to be ecologically disastrous”. His book will make that shift more likely.
Graeme Green is a journalist and writer based in Derbyshire, UK
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