As dawn broke in central Kenya, a helicopter lifted off in a race to find roosting locusts before the sun warmed their bodies and sent them on a ravenous flight through farmland.
Pilot Kieran Allen began his painstaking survey from zebra-filled plains and lush maize farms, to dramatic forested valleys and the vast arid expanses further north, his eyes scouring the landscape for signs of the massed insects.
The chopper suddenly swung around after a call came in from the locust war room on the ground: a community in the foothills of Mount Kenya has reported a swarm.
Photo: AFP
“I am seeing some pink in the trees,” his voice crackled over the headphones, pointing to a roughly 30-hectare swathe of desert locusts.
Reddish-pink in their immature — and hungriest — phase, the insects smothered the tips of a pine forest.
Allen determined that nearby farms were at a safe distance and called in a second aircraft, which arrived in minutes to spray the swarm with pesticide.
On the ground, having warmed to just the right temperature, the thick cloud of locusts filled the air with a rustling akin to light rainfall.
However, in a few hours, many would be dead from the effect of the poison.
Last month alone, Allen logged almost 25,000km of flight — more than half the circumference of the world — in his hunt for locusts after a fresh wave of insects invaded Kenya from Somalia and Ethiopia.
Like other pilots involved in the operation — who have switched from their usual business of firefighting, tourism, or rescuing hikers in distress — he has become an expert on locusts and the dangers they pose.
“Those wheat fields feed a lot of the country. It would be a disaster if they got in there,” he said, pointing to a vast farm in a particularly fertile area of Mount Kenya.
Desert locusts are a part of the grasshopper family that form massive swarms when breeding is spurred by good rains.
They are notoriously difficult to control, for they move up to 150km daily. Each locust eats its weight in vegetation daily and multiplies 20-fold every three months.
The locusts first infested the east and Horn of Africa in the middle of 2019, eventually invading nine countries as the region experienced one of its wettest rainy seasons in decades.
Some countries like Kenya had not seen the pest in up to 70 years and the initial response was hampered by poor coordination, lack of pesticides and aircraft, said Cyril Ferrand, a Nairobi-based expert with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
A slick new operation to combat a second wave of the pests has improved control and cooperation in Kenya, Ethiopia and parts of Somalia.
In Kenya, the FAO has teamed up with the company 51 Degrees, which specializes in managing protected areas.
It has rejigged software developed for tracking poaching, injured wildlife and illegal logging and other conservation needs to instead trace and tackle locust swarms.
A hotline takes calls from village chiefs or some of the 3,000 trained scouts, and aircraft are dispatched.
Data on the size of the swarms and direction of travel are shared with the pilots as well as governments and organizations battling the invasion in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.
“Our approach has completely been changed by good data, by timely data, and by accurate data,” 51 Degrees director Batian Craig said.
The operation in Kenya had focused on a “first line of defense” in remote and sometimes hostile border areas, which had successfully broken up massive swarms coming in from Ethiopia and Somalia before they reach farmland further south, he said.
In a complex relay, when the wind shifts and the swarms head back into Ethiopia, pilots waiting on the other side of the border take over the operation.
Southern and central Somalia is a no-go zone due to the presence of al-Shabaab militants and the teams can only wait for the swarms to cross over.
Ferrand told reporters that last year the infestation affected the food supply and livelihoods of about 2.5 million people, and was expected to affect 3.5 million this year.
While a forecast of below-average rainfall and the improved control operation could help curb the infestation, it was difficult to say when it would end, he said.
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