16-05-2025
Is a River Alive?: Read an exclusive excerpt from Robert Macfarlane's new book
Dusk falling fast on the coast. A night wind rising. Chennai flashes and blinks behind us.
Huge surf breaks and withdraws, breaks and withdraws, filling the air with its roar. Somewhere a dog-pack howls.
In the black ink of the ocean, night travellers are approaching shore, drawn and directed by instincts etched deep into their brains by evolution's needle.
Sea-mist shows grainy where arc-light falls. Salt in the nose, stinging lips. A barn owl is hunched on the skeleton of an abandoned building. Its feathers glow faintly white: a phantom in the girders.
Yuvan and I have at last, in our slow descent of the rivers of Chennai, reached the sea. We have arrived at the long shore where the Adyar, the Cooum and the Kosasthalaiyar meet the Indian Ocean: Chennai's celebrated beach, a vast intertidal zone, a meeting of worlds which stretches for miles along the coast.
Tonight we will not sleep. Tonight we will walk the beach, watching and waiting for female Olive Ridley sea turtles – those night travellers – to haul themselves ashore, dig their nests and lay their eggs.
The fossil record shows that sea turtles have been voyaging the oceans of Earth for at least 120 million years: that is to say, some 70 million years before the Indian Plate crashed into the Eurasian Plate to create the Himalayas and fuse what is now India to what is now Asia.
Sea turtles have survived much upon this Earth in their long tenure, but it is possible they will not survive us. Human predation, exploitation and habitat destruction are proving severe challenges for these gentle, deep- sea voyagers. For centuries now, sea turtles have been caught and killed for meat, eggs, bait, leather and oil. Turtle meat was a fuel that powered the engine of colonialism: the British would stack the storage decks of their ships with living sea turtles in order to provide a durable source of fresh meat for long voyages. Now far fewer turtles are killed for their meat, but many more die after being struck by the hulls or propellors of ships, snagged in trawl- lines or tangled fatally in the thousands of abandoned 'ghost nets' which haunt the world's oceans.
Between January and April each year, hundreds of female Olive Ridley turtles come ashore in the darkness to nest on the Chennai coast. And for thirty years, during nesting season, a group of volunteers has been walking the beaches every single night, in order to guard the mothers from harm and ensure the safety of their eggs. They call themselves the 'Turtle Patrol'. Yuvan has walked with this group many times. The leader is a man called Arun Venkatraman. Few people know more about sea turtles' lives and deaths in southern India than he does. Arun is fifty or so. He is tall, tired and articulate. 'It is a bad year for the turtles so far,' he says to me. 'We have had around a hundred nests and a hundred dead turtles. We walk the beach each night to the smell of rotting flesh. Those are the ones killed offshore, who then wash up here. All the nice dreams about leaving the turtles to their nesting have gone up in smoke. The beaches have become very unsafe. Tractors will collapse the egg pits, feral dogs will dig the eggs out.'
When turtle hatchlings do emerge from their eggs, and excavate themselves from the sand, they are evolutionarily attuned to move towards the dazzle- path of moonlight on the sea or the bioluminescence of breaking waves. But now Chennai's bright lights confuse them. Street lamps and building lights lure many hatchlings inland, where they die on dry land, eaten by dogs or crushed by the wheels of vehicles.
This is why the Turtle Patrol walks the beach carrying soft cloth bags. When a new turtle nest is found, they dig it out by hand, then carefully lift the eggs out and bag them, counting them as they surface. The eggs are then carried to a hatchery: a safe, fenced area on the beach. There they are reburied in the sand, in new nest- holes handdug to the same depth and dimensions as the true nest from which they have been taken. Records are kept of each nest: time, location and date of both finding and reburial; size of nest; number of eggs. Around forty days later, the sand above the new nest will begin to quake – and out will struggle scores of hatchlings, whom the Patrol oversee as they make for the ocean, turning back any that head inland.
Arun estimates that the Turtle Patrol releases twenty thousand hatchlings in a good year. But many more nests and eggs are lost to dogs, and the burn rate of those hatchlings who do emerge from the hatchery's eggs is very high, even under the care of the Patrol. Only around one in a thousand will survive to reach sexual maturity as an adult turtle. Of all the threats sea turtles face, perhaps the greatest is climate change. Fascinatingly, the sex of a sea turtle hatchling is determined by the temperature at which the eggs gestate. The flip-point for sea turtle sexing in India is 31.5°C. Below that, the majority of eggs become male. Above that, the majority become female. Today, due to global warming, the sand on Chennai beach is reliably in the thirties, even as early in the year as February. The result is that future breeding ratios are heavily skewed.
Yuvan, Arun and I wait together on the night beach for the rest of the Patrol to gather. We eat slices of hard mango sprinkled with salt and chilli powder, which set our lips tingling. Men sit alone in the dark on sand, silently watching the ocean. Couples hold hands. Boys in trainers laugh as they play chicken with the waves. Yuvan and I face the ocean and read aloud a praise-poem to the sea turtles – a ghazal – called 'Night- Swimmer' that we have written together over the past few months:
What stories, what wishes, what warnings do you bring, night-swimmer? What wonders, what perils – the whale pods, the ghost nets – have you seen as you explore, Sea Turtle…?
Hauled up along the beach are sharp-prowed wooden fishing boats, painted yellows and blues and reds, with powerful outboards lying flat on their sterns. These are the workhorses of the fisherfolk. They are fleet, elegant craft, designed to ride out through the big surf and then to work the waters within half a mile of the shore, rocking on the rollers.
Far out at sea the mast lights of the trawlers can now be seen: seven or eight ships at least, harvesting perhaps six miles offshore, their long nets and lines slung behind them. This is the gauntlet the mother turtles must run to reach the shore safely: hulls, propellors, flipper-snagging nets and hooks. Other people drift out of the darkness to join us. There are curious locals from Chennai, and visitors from Hyderabad and Bangalore. All want to know more about these mysterious sea-beings, the turtles. We finally start walking at midnight. Arun leads. He invites me to join him at the front. We trudge north together. The main group stays thirty yards behind. Arun holds a torch and sweeps the sand in front of him in quick, efficient arcs, like a detective working a crime scene.
I think he's looking for turtles, but really he's looking for tracks.
The sand shelves steeply down to the surf. In the dark, the slope feels steep enough to slide down. The waves are big, brawling creatures, crashing ashore, surging up the berm and then clawing anything they catch back towards the deep. It is an intimidating sea. What must the Boxing Day tsunami have been like here? I wonder. The ocean rearing up like a curved wall of smooth concrete . . .
A young woman comes up to me in the darkness with cupped hands. She opens them to show a tiny fleck of iridescent blue, the bright blue of old glacial ice. It shifts and runs in her palm like a sprite. 'Put out your hand,' she says, so I do, and she pours the quantum of light into my palm.
'Sea-sparkle,' says Yuvan, who has joined us. 'Bioluminescence. Rare at this time of year, but in monsoon the sewage treatment plants get overwhelmed, so you get more of the algal bloom feeding on the nutrients in the effluent, and therefore the sea- sparkle is brighter. At such times, the whole ocean can glitter with it far out from the shore. A degraded magic, if ever I heard it.'
I pass the blue spark on, dabbing it with a finger into Yuvan's palm, and he carries it off in the darkness to give to someone else. Suddenly I'm back in the high clearing in the cloud- forest, with the mycelium shining in that deep equatorial darkness. You can see all the veins of the forest lit up – you can see that everything is connected . . .
'Last year I was for a fortnight or so with the Idu Mishmi people in the north of India,' says Yuvan when he catches me back up, 'to see if I could help their resistance to a mega- dam project planned for their river, the Dibang River. To them, it is a world- ending project: the river and the mountains around are the home of spirits, or khinus. The Lepcha people in Sikkim are also protesting a dam project on their Teesta River; their language is soaked in river metaphors. If their river is blocked, so their language and stories will be also.'
glyan˙: the human spine; also the course of a river or the flow of time
a-čin : uniting; as do two ridges of hills, or two rivers, or the veins of the body
dár : to give birth, to procreate; also to increase as a river does after rain
tsuˇ n : to join, to meet, to be confluent as rivers are
I hear a faint ringing of little bells. Five glass flasks float in the darkness ahead. Within the flasks, glowing points of white light roam and flicker. Are they fireflies? A man in black clothes materializes out of the night behind them as we approach, holding these strange alembics of light.
An older woman walks towards us, bearing a sparkling silver stick with which she points questioningly at my hands. Yuvan speaks to her in Tamil, gestures to her to walk on.
'She wants to tell your future, Rob. She will tap on your hand with the stick to do so. I told her there was no need.'
I wish now that I had let her do so.
Points of light are everywhere: the stars, the sea-sparkle, the clairvoyant's shimmering stick, the flasks with their fireflies . . .
The smell tells us before we see it. Death is in the air. There it is: the shell and rotting corpse of an Olive Ridley sea turtle. Arun pauses at the body, checks something briefly, murmurs something, strides on.
Yuvan and I stop beside her. Her nictitating membranes have closed over her eyes so they are milky grey. Her shell, bowed out like a conquistador's chest armour, is surprisingly small. There is a split running laterally across its layered hexagons.
'Another trawler strike, Rob. Either hull or the propellor. An impact death. You can see that this one has been counted by the Patrol. They tie a line of cord around a front flipper to show she's been added to the tally; that's what Arun just stopped to check for. Olive Ridleys are passive swimmers. They swim only just below the surface as they come in to breed. The fisherfolk can see them, and steer around them. The trawlers: no chance. They just plough right over them.'
(Excerpted with permission from Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane; published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin; 2025)
