The Wardman Wire

Iain Dale includes a locust swarm for Oxfordshire in his predictions for 2008:

David Cameron forced to cancel trip to Rwanda after his Witney constituency is affected by a plague of locusts.

As it happens I have a solution for them, since Oxfordshire is probably the heartland on earth for Ducks (apart from the “Eeyup Ducks” of Yorkshire and the Midlands).

When I was pulling together my article about the 29,000 ocean current monitoring yellow plastic bath ducks last week, I came across the elite force of 700,000 anti-locust ducks trained up by the Chinese Government. I kid you not - here’s the story on the BBC (and a version for Gallomites - the followers of The Great Profit George Galloway “of the Bungle”):

An elite force of more than 700,000 ducks and chickens has been deployed as China’s latest weapon to take on an invasion of locusts.

The poultry army has been sent to the western front in Xinjiang province where swarms of locusts have devoured more than 3.8 million hectares of crops and grassland.

The birds are trained to seek out and consume the pests at the sound of a whistle which they have been trained to associate with feeding.

“We release them on the grassland, blow whistles and they eat the locusts”, an official with the Xinjiang Locust and Rat Control Office is quoted as saying.

(Pictures: BBC).

Apparently the SAS Ducks can eat “up to 400″ locusts a day.

I seem to remember locust swarms in East Africa in the late 1950s reported to have a lot (up to 5,000,000,000) of locusts (youth misspent with Guinness Book of Records).

5,000,000,000 locusts would take 700,000 ducks … er … 50,000 over 7 drake-days to consume at maximum efficiency, which - assuming no digestion-days are needed - comes to just under 20 years.

Hmmmmmmm.

Does anyone have any long-lived breeds of duck?

Or long-lived breeds of locust?