Nepal, Aug. 29 -- For the first time in over 45 years, the cuckoo didn't arrive in our garden to herald the spring. The lapsi tree it usually sits in is there, as are the crows that it uses to nurse its young. I am not the only one who was left bereft. All over the Valley, people have missed this bird's beloved kuohkuoh this year.

Over the years, closely watching unchecked climate change and broken carbon-emission control promises, I had dreaded the day the cuckoo would forsake us, due to a warmer spring and an increasingly hostile Valley with fewer and fewer green spaces. However, mourning the absence of the visiting cuckoo is not merely a lament about the loss of a songbird; it is a harbinger of how our climate has already changed to a...