Can mindful tourism save India's mangrove forests?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The narrow sliver of ground at the edge of the water is slushy and slithery, glimmering in the mid-morning sun. It is punctuated by small pointy root-like structures, a few inches in height, sticking up from the slimy earth, while tiny creatures make tentative appearances, darting in and out of holes in the ground.

The tide is just receding at the Pichavaram mangroves in Tamil Nadu, about 240km south of Chennai, and a whole new landscape is emerging.  As a tiny rowboat pushes off from the noisy jetty near Killai village and begins to glide down a wide channel of greenish-brown water, silence descends quickly, broken only by the gentle and rhythmic splash of oars. The tree cover is so thick that it is impossible to see even a few feet beyond, but the ground that is slowly emerging from the retreating tide is alive with life. Around the sticking roots, called pneumatophores, hermit crabs and bright yellow fiddler crabs dart around.

More riveting are the mudskippers, strange-looking creatures that appear like a cross between a fish and a frog, flopping on the mushy ground. The common kingfisher, with its bright blue wings and bright orange underbelly, flashes by every now and then. It is less easy to spot the pied kingfisher, its body a mottled design of black and white, almost camouflaged in the speckled shadows.

There are others too: egrets, herons, storks, darters, wagtails, cormorants and a host of tiny birds that are difficult for a novice such as me to identify. This moving tableau changes only subtly as the boat pushes further and further into the network of channels that grow narrower the further in we go. By now, the silence is complete, the oars barely skimming the water