When the koel birds don’t know when to sing anymore (and what that tells us about the fragile future we’re still writing)

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.

2020, the male Asian koel in Sri Lanka, Lahiru Prabudda Fernando

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.

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata, University of Bangor, and University of Glasgow research shows that most birds' breeding habits are shaped by human activity. Read more.

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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How an editorial decision altered a 600 year old festival

Researching commissioned stories, we sometimes come across informational gems. This story—on how the current format of Sri Lanka’s traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year was shaped by an editorial decision—is based on one such discovery.

Sri Lanka’s traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year, celebrated in April, is not a calendrical reset. It’s more accurately described as a choreography of land, sky, and communal intention. Celebrated by both Sinhala and Tamil communities, it’s an astrological, agricultural and lifestyle celebration that highlights the hybrid beauty of Sri Lankan culture. Today, the New Year feels timeless, but it is in fact a recent curation—a cultural remix made so by printing technology, political movement, and the pressures of scaling. 

An editorial decision that reshaped culture

The traditional new year, in its earliest form, was a sprawling, many-weeked observance. This oldest form of the festival incorporated ayurvedic practices, environmental sustainability, musical offerings, as much as it drew from prehistoric harvest rituals, indigenous customs, Vedic astrology, and animistic reverence. Throughout the weeks, there were rituals for sound offerings through musical instruments to wake the land and human spirit. There were rituals for saving seeds from the last harvest for the new year. Ceremonial tree planting was a ritual practiced in each household as well as communally, with royal patronage. Ancestors were remembered not through photos but through gestures of charity and visits to ancestral homes and villages. Some regions lit nightlong fires. Others observed absolute silence. But not all of this survived. 

In 1855, Epa Appuhamy set out to print the first local panchaanga litha (almanac) with traditional new year rituals. Epa had to list all the auspicious times practiced in the entire island and print them on a single sheet of paper to keep it affordable to the market. It was impossible. He made a decision. Being a highly experienced astrologer, Epa was confident enough to distill the rituals down to a curated few. It was the beginning of the now iconic Epa almanac that hangs in kitchens to this day. The ‘Epa Panchanga Litha’ went on to become a household name and trusted guide. Epa almanac’s lasting success almost single-handedly reshaped the traditional new year. The rituals that Epa left behind were not necessarily unimportant—only unprintable. Yet, what didn’t make it to print were forgotten and lost to the tides of time. 

The official gazette of Ceylon recognizing Epa alamanc as a printed publication.

When editorial act becomes cultural legacy

Concurrently, Sri Lanka’s nationalist movement did something similar—this time not for layout and marketability, but in the name of unification. Keen to reinvigorate identity under colonial rule, nationalist leaders repopularized the traditional new year. By making it compact, the traditional new year was easily parceled and packaged as part of the national campaign. The rituals were streamlined following Epa’s almanac, leaflets were distributed, and the idea of a national new year tradition was born. The regionally diverse rituals were further compressed or omitted. Unification, while it brought visibility and focus, also brought erasure of diversity. Village-specific customs and rituals got limited to memory, lore, and scholarly articles—if not faded into oblivion.

In 1993, the Ministry of Religious and Cultural Affairs began convening the State Auspicious Committee, consisting of expert astrologers, to prepare and publish the official ritual times for each year. They inherited not just tradition, but Epa’s editorial logic, carrying forward the rituals retained by the Epa almanac. It solidified the long-term influence a single editorial decision had on shaping one of Sri Lanka’s most popular celebrations at a national scale. This shows how what we call ‘tradition’ is, in truth, once a choice made by a mere human, like you and me. 

Does culture shape us or do we shape it?

Understanding the true, evolving nature of our rituals liberates us from false nostalgia. Culture is not a fossil. It's not fixed. It's a living reflection of its people, tools, and arts, as much as its constraints and dreams. How Epa Appuhamy’s editorial decision changed a six-hundred-year-old cultural festival is a reflection of how culture is a living phenomenon shaped by people, their creativity, technology and tools.

Which means we have a choice. If tradition was once rewritten by the printing page size, word counts and a political campaign, then we, too, as living mirrors of our times and the members of current society, are entitled to shape our cultures as we see fit. 

What would you choose to set as culture in a world marked by environmental collapse and the quiet unravelling of natural systems? We are not only witnesses—we are still participants. Culture is not something we inherit untouched; it is something we craft, refine, and carry forward with intention. In this present day of information overwhelm, what rituals should we nurture? As global conflicts, economic disparities, and the ease of the privileged few shape our daily lives and fragile local economies, what gestures of care, protest, or remembrance might we use to meet the challenges of our time? We are called, perhaps urgently so, to ask what new expressions of culture could help us remain human, connected, and awake.

Because either way, the sun will still cross our hypothetical line and enter what we label a ‘new year’, continuing its natural course regardless of our microscopic lives. But the decisions we make today can still set our cultural context for the times to come. It’s worth a shot to use our imagination and conscience to try and mold it for the better.

I hope my son finds this story

Holding the book in my hands allows me to relive the journey and the emotions associated with it. The picture book of memories seems to be more tangible compared to digital formats. Like a family photo album. The uniqueness of it, the curled page edges, the broken spine, the feel of the pages, and the parts of it that give it character have become part of what makes it a memento that can be shared when I am with friends and family. The book is called “The Traveling with Roberta Goole Picture Book” and it lives on my bookshelf waiting for someone looking for an adventure story, to discover.

I hope my son finds this story…

Sandwiched between a book about altered states of consciousness and Hindu worship practices, is “The Traveling With Roberta Gooole Picture Book”

The book was named after a car. That year, we spent half of the summer driving across Canada and the United States. The Pontiac 6000LE is a mid-size sedan known for its reliability, comfortable ride, and spacious interior. It seated three friends in the front (driver included), and three friends in the back. The limited space between the characters and the font used to make the model logo accidentally made the six in “6000LE look more like a “G”. So the car was often referred to as the Pontiac Gooole (pronounced Gooli). They said it was the poor man’s BMW; my first car and it was sky blue.

The pages are in cronological order; from the day we start the trip across Canada and back through the US.

We were recent art and design graduates and thought it would be a good time to drive across the country. We worked for a year and took whatever money we had saved to buy fuel, food, and camping equipment. We travelled simply to go across and back.

Each picture is little story; something that happened, someone we met along the way, or something extraordinary that we saw.

Roberta took us 4,429km across the land, through forests, along freshwater lakes, and cornfields; the towns we stopped in, and the roads we took. Between cities, there were long stretches of vast open land. As we travelled, farmland turned into forests, prairies into big mountains, rivers into great lakes, and small town roads to the trans-Canada highway; we learned the country.

It's nostalgic and comforting to see yourself in the past, in that special moment.

Had I uploaded this story to the internet somewhere first I don’t think I would have made this book. Make your stories analog first, then capsule them out into bite-size pieces on the internet. Let people find your stories this way; bring them closer, to the point where you can tell them stories in person. The book becomes a fire around which a community shares together.