Locusts again

 

I briefly mentioned locusts towards the end of a previous blog entry .... 

http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2020/07/mama-pat-african-updates-and-qavs.html

.... and now the plague is back in Kenya in ever greater swarms.

The Daily Telegraph recently had a report:-  "Biblical plague or manageable threat? Swarms of the pests, driven by climate change, are wreaking havoc on the food supply of a region regularly facing acute bouts of hunger"

From the air, the mountain valleys are awash with millions of flitting white dots. A swarm about twice the size of the City of London ready to devour every bit of vegetation in its wake looks like this from the air.

    

"Last year, East Africa was hit by a once-in-a-lifetime invasion of voracious desert locusts. Billions of insects poured across the border into Kenya from the Arabian Peninsula, Somalia and Ethiopia. 

Commentators compared it to something from the Old Testament – a biblical plague of Abraham, driven on by climate change, wreaking havoc on the food supply of a region which regularly faces acute bouts of hunger.

There had been nothing like it in Kenya since the 1950s and officials were caught flatfooted, trying to battle swarms roughly the size of Luxembourg with a handful of planes and almost no proper equipment. 

Pilots tasked with spotting the swarms sent their locations back to base on WhatsApp on shoddy rural internet connections.

A single locust swarm can contain up to 80 million locusts and fly 30 to 80 miles in one day depending on the wind. By the time, spraying planes arrived at the WhatsApp coordinates the next day, it was often too late. 

The locusts had warmed up in the morning sun and moved off into the wilderness, laying millions of eggs. Every day, each locust can eat its weight in vegetation daily and multiplies twenty-fold every three months. A swarm can easily eat as much food as 35,000 people in a single day and multiple two dozen times in three months."

Pilots of small planes and helicopters more used to flying celebrities to game lodges are now tracking swarms as they settle for the night, and are ready at dawn to spray the settled swarm as they start to warm up in the dawn sun .... and spray with a U.N. approved pesticide.  

(summarised from a Daily Telegraph report)