When the koel birds don’t know when to sing anymore (and what that tells us about the fragile future we’re still writing)
- Shamalee de Silva Parizeau
- Apr 21
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 27
For centuries, the mating call of the koel has meant when the sun peaked for the tropics. Koel cries coincided with warmth in equatorial regions across Asia. But now, something has shifted. The koel love songs are no longer limited to the season.
In South Asia, when the sun inched closer to being directly above the subcontinent forming optimal breeding conditions for koel birds, their cries would pierce the air. The bird’s unmistakable, rising, crescendo call would resonate through March and April as the heat peaked. The calls typically faded as the monsoons began. In regional folklore and literature, the koel is probably the most romanticized bird. For farmers, the koel’s cry marked the harvest while lovers found its pleading calls entwined with longing, and poets wove the bird into passing time and seasonal rhythms. Both the koel’s striking sound and the strict seasonality of its songs contributed to this mystique. But now, the koel cries throughout the year, its calls grow feverish and spill into the rainy months and beyond without a pause. It mimics the strangeness of the seasons. Where once the koel songs marked the predictable flow of time and seasons, today it adds to the noise of an uncertain world with blurred rhythms. The once-sacred synchronicity has frayed. The koels no longer know when to sing.
The reasons, as we know right now, are the rising temperatures that confuse the birds’ sense of season, and the increase in garbage which has adjusted the breeding of koel’s host species. Koels are brood parasites, who lay their eggs in the nests of a host species—usually crows. The increase in urban and suburban garbage, which is the main food source of crows, has made their breeding patterns more sporadic. This, in turn, has influenced the koels’ breeding and mating times. It’s another example of how humans’ feverish sprawl, our excess, and the resulting rising of temperatures and pollution has distorted the delicate cues of nature. The koel call was once a song of renewal. Now, it’s a warning.
The koel’s confusion mirrors something far larger—an unraveling we must take note of, for our own sakes even if something more selfless can’t be mustered.
Our world is filled with signs, like the confused koel song—small anomalies that echo great imbalances. Last November was the most alarming mass coral bleaching in history. Wildfires in places that once knew snow. Rivers that vanish, not into oceans, but into thirst of drying lands. And always, it is the animals, the poor, the landless, the already-vulnerable who feel it first. In the same reality, we watch billionaires launch themselves into space on short-haul vanity trips. We watch mega yachts roam while island nations sink. Wars rage on, funded and fed by resource greed and nationalist fiction, while those with the least end up paying with their homes, their hunger, their futures. What we are witnessing isn’t ignorance. It’s indifference shaped by the insulation of power and wealth.
And perhaps the most powerful act now is to decide where we place our attention—and what we choose to amplify. Because attention, like time or soil, can grow what we feed. If we spend it orbiting billionaires in space, reacting to power plays or drowning in the spectacle of distant wars and economic hoarding, we keep the old stories alive—the ones where only the powerful matter, and the rest of us are just spectators.
But we don’t have to play that role.
In cities especially, where our attention is pulled in a hundred directions, the most radical thing we can do is to turn our gaze closer. To spend it on rooftop gardens, town clean ups, activating neighbourhood green spaces, or in the local council voters’ queues. On initiating food growth in communal spaces; on purchasing from small businesses trying to do things right; on supporting the right initiatives with the work we do. These aren’t sentimental distractions. They are survival strategies—and they scale.
Culture, like climate, is made or broken in increments.
Maybe one day, we can undo the koel birds’ confusion so they can sense when to sing again. There is a local medicinal proverb that the antidote is found the poison. While we humans are the Earth’s greatest malady, in us is also the remedy.
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