Point Calimere: The Cape of Flamingos and Blackbuck

At the far south-eastern elbow of the Cauvery delta, the long Coromandel coast finally runs out of east and bends away to the west. This low, sandy headland is Point Calimere — Kodiakkarai in Tamil, roughly ‘the land at the end’ — where the open Bay of Bengal narrows into the shallow, sheltered Palk Strait that separates India from Sri Lanka. It is an unassuming place of scrub, salt and mudflat, and yet in the cool months it becomes one of the great gathering grounds for waterbirds on the whole east coast of India.

Where the Coromandel coast turns west

Point Calimere sits at the tip of a broad cape that marks the meeting of two seas — the Bay of Bengal to the east and the Palk Strait to the south and west. The whole headland and its surrounding wetlands are protected as the Point Calimere Wildlife and Bird Sanctuary, first notified in 1967. The cape itself, with its lighthouse and the traces of far older beacons, is a landmark for sailors and pilgrims alike; you can read more about it at the cape and Chola lighthouse. Because the coast turns here, tide, wind and current pile up shallow lagoons and mudflats behind the beach — exactly the shifting, brackish edge that shorebirds thrive on.

A Ramsar wetland of flamingos and blackbuck

What draws birdwatchers is the sheer number of wintering waterbirds. In a good season the mudflats and salt pans hold tens of thousands of greater flamingos, their pink-and-white flocks wading in the shallows, along with the smaller and scarcer lesser flamingo and great flights of ducks, waders, gulls and terns — well over a hundred species in all. It was this wealth of birdlife, together with the surrounding wetlands, that earned the area recognition as a Ramsar site of international importance in 2002. Yet the sanctuary was originally created for a mammal: the blackbuck, the elegant spiral-horned antelope that still bounds across the open grassland here in what is often described as one of the largest populations in South India. Sharing the scrub are spotted deer, wild boar, bonnet macaques, golden jackals and a well-known herd of feral horses.

Dry evergreen forest and the Great Vedaranyam Salt Swamp

Behind the beach the cape carries something rare: a surviving tract of tropical dry evergreen forest, a low, tangled woodland of hardy salt-tolerant trees that once fringed much of this coast and now clings on in only a handful of places. It is widely regarded as one of the best remaining examples of this threatened forest type in India, and it gives Point Calimere a green, almost secretive interior quite unlike the bare salt flats nearby. To the west stretches the Great Vedaranyam Salt Swamp — a vast expanse of tidal mudflat and shallow brine, laced with the old salt pans that made Vedaranyam famous during the 1930 salt march. It is this mosaic of forest, grassland, mangrove and swamp, all packed into a small area, that lets so many different creatures share the cape.

An old lighthouse, a Chola cape and the 1964 cyclone

The cape has guided shipping for a very long time. Tradition holds that a brick beacon stood here as far back as the Chola period, when this coast was part of a great maritime kingdom trading across the Bay of Bengal; the ruined stump long known as the Chola lighthouse is said to have been lost to the sea in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Near it rise the pilgrimage shrine of Ramar Padam and, nearby, the Vedaranyeswarar Temple at Vedaranyam, one of the coast’s revered Shiva temples. The modern banded lighthouse now does the work of warning ships off the shoals. This is a low, exposed coast, and it has paid for it: the ferocious cyclone of December 1964 that wiped the town of Dhanushkodi off the map, further south, also raked this shore, and later storms and the 2004 tsunami are reminders of how fragile life on the cape can be.

Visiting

Point Calimere is a place to slow down. The wildlife season runs roughly from November to February, when the migratory birds are in and the flamingo flocks are at their fullest; early morning and late afternoon are the times to walk the trails or scan the salt pans, ideally with the sanctuary’s own guides, who know where the blackbuck and the birds are on any given day. It is a long haul from the main tourist circuit — Nagapattinam, Thanjavur and Vedaranyam are the nearest bases — so most visitors come as dedicated birders or as a quiet coda to a delta tour. Bring binoculars, water, sun protection and patience. If Point Calimere whets your appetite for Tamil Nadu’s wild places, plan the rest of your trip with our guides to /india/tamil-nadu/guides/bird-sanctuaries-of-tamil-nadu and /india/tamil-nadu/guides/tamil-nadu-wildlife-national-parks.