Popinjay Art (2)

If you think Damien Hirst is bad, I invite you to Clairac's International Art Salon coming up this month in Clairac (Lot et Garonne, France). Contemporary Art is sick enough when it is original, but in the hands of French provincial pastiche merchants it truly heralds the end of civilisation. The nude in the poster for the exhibit looks as if she has been hit by a TGV before being smeared onto the canvas with kitchen implements and preserved with some kind of industrial plasticiser. Her severed right arm has been saved for an arresting sculpture to be unveiled over the vin d'honneur after the speeches.

Fuel shortage hits swifts

Has anyone seen our swifts? They disappeared from our village in mid-May halfway through the breeding season and haven't been seen since. On the insect front, we have also only had seven flies, one potter wasp and a single humming bird hawk moth (macroglossum stellatarum) in the house all summer. The two facts may be related. Presumably swifts, which spend all their lives on the wing except when nesting, and (I have read somewhere) fly five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon in a lifetime, need a certain amount of fuel, measured, let us say, in grams of insects per kilometre. So when the density of airborne insect protein falls below the required threshold, what gives?

Swifts live up to their name and are born racers - until they crash. Once they fall to Earth they have trouble taking off again because their wings are too long. They can't feed and they lose morale fast. Anyone who has tried to restart a crashed swift or make it feed from the hand knows the problem.

Apart from their role in keeping down the mosquito population, swifts fulfil an essential function in livening up peaceful village evenings with their noisy rodeos. So are the treetops, hedgerows and ditches littered with swifts who just fell from the sky because of a shortage of insect protein? And are rustic eaves now full of the corpses of the chicks whose mothers never came back to feed them?