And in the let’s see how can we rescue the mood for the weekend – department, here is a glimmer of hope for locus-infested Pakistan: 100 000 ducks. Courtesy of China, no less.

Locusts had three uninterrupted exceptional breeding cycles due to the 2018/19 cyclone season that brought deluges to the Arab peninsula. They are now swarming into East Africa and South Asia, threatening already scarce food supplies and leading to states of emergency.

Sending hungry fowl is not new – in 2000, a 700,000-strong army of ducks and chickens was used to gain control over swarms of locusts that devoured over 3.8 million hectares of crops and grassland. As it turns out, ducks were more efficient than chickens at guzzling down the devastating pests, they stayed in group and did not disappear randomly into the landscape like their little headless friends…

So: 100,000 ducks are awaiting deployment along some 3,000 miles from the eastern province of Zhejiang to Pakistan, which shares a border with the Xinjiang province.

Quack. Quack. Let’s hope they have insatiable appetites.

Musical topic today is not for the faint of heart but for those who want to faint from laughing. The larger than life persona behind The Homosexual Necrophilica Duck Opera is duck guy Kees Moeliker, Director of the Museum for Natural History Rotterdam. He won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for his paper of the same name as the opera. The video has him introduce the work and then presents the miniature opera.

Let no-one ever accuse me of not trying to widen our horizons, musical and otherwise….