An animal shelter near Nice in the south of France is attempting to save some 200 birds and small mammals at risk of dehydration and undernourishment because of drought and the sequence of summer heatwaves sweeping the country.
The long, hot summer is tough for everybody. But if you are a bat, a bird, a baby squirrel, or a hedgehog, the heatwave could be fatal.
The drought means that drinking water is hard to find. That's serious. But the drying up of the streams, lakes and ponds where insects normally breed also means that the creatures who feed on insects and larvae are running short of food as well as water.
For young creatures, that's a potentially lethal combination.
As Hélène Bovalis, founder of the animal shelter at Saint-Cezaire-sur-Siagne, points out in an interview with the Reuters news agency, the impact of this abnormally hot summer comes in addition to other factors, like pesticides and insecticides, which have already reduced the insect biomass dramatically.
And Bovalis is anxious to point out that this is not just a summer problem for cute little creatures.
"We're talking about one health," she says. "If one species is suffering, we're all going to suffer, sooner or later.
"Fewer insects means less food for insect-eating animals, and that means less biodiversity.
"We are dealing with a very serious series of events in which we play a role of look-out, a sort of observatory that records these imbalances and tries to compensate for them through our rescue actions."
