PARIS, Aug. 7 -- -- Farmers in southwestern France are asking firefighters to water their flocks of fowl, because thousands of birds have dropped dead from the heat. At Amsterdam's zoo, chimpanzees are being given iced fruit to cool off. And a Dutch animal rights group is seeking the postponement of a homing pigeon contest this weekend, out of fear the birds will expire before they reach their destination.
Most of western and central Europe continued to bake under record-breaking temperatures today, and it wasn't only animals that were suffering.
The heat has been blamed for the deaths of more than 30 people, and the misery of millions. It also has slowed rail traffic in Britain, threatened to halt shipping on rivers in Germany and spawned forest fires in France and Spain.
The temperature reached 104 degrees in Paris, the highest on record. It touched 95 in London, 97 in Frankfurt, 98 in Geneva and 91 in usually cool and rainy Amsterdam.
Caused by a front from North Africa, the heat will probably persist for at least the next few days, meteorologists said, and possibly until September, although some areas reported the first signs of a slight cooling trend. However long, it will be too long for millions of Europeans who live in its embrace, for the most part without air conditioning.
In the meantime, people are making accommodations.
Security guards at parks and museums in capitals such as London and Paris have relaxed strict no-wading rules to allow heat-frazzled visitors to cool off in public fountains.
At the Euro-Disney theme park outside Paris, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the other popular characters are being rotated every 20 minutes, to give park employees more time outside of the hot, stuffy suits. Disney is setting up extra umbrellas and installing shower systems to allow visitors to cool off, and employees are advising visitors to keep on their hats and T-shirts to avoid overexposure to the sun, a park management official said.
Paris is out of both air conditioners and electric fans, following a run on both. "We were out of stock for three days already," said Philippe Gudil, in the appliance department of the Galeries Lafayette store. "We will not get any more fans because the suppliers are out of stock, themselves. I am not sure whether anyone can find a fan in Paris now."
City swimming pools in Paris were packed today, with double the usual number of visitors, as was the two-mile artificial beachfront set up with trucked-in sand along the banks of the Seine River. In the city's Belleville neighborhood, where illegal Chinese immigrants often sleep seven or eight to a small room, Liwen Dong, a spokesman for one immigrant group, said, "At night, we can't sleep until 3 a.m."
At the otherwise state-of-the-art Georges Pompidou Hospital, staffers were using ventilators to cool patients' rooms, because the hospital has no air conditioning.
Water use has been restricted in more than half of France's 95 administrative districts. The searing heat is devastating crops in the central and southwestern parts of the country, and drivers are being warned to watch out for cows and other livestock crossing highways in search of water.
In places, transportation is being threatened. On Wednesday, a British Airways Concorde supersonic jet en route from London to New York made an unscheduled stop in Canada, because the hot air in Europe had caused it to burn extra fuel, according to reports here.
Some British trains were forced to slow down for fear of the tracks buckling in the heat. In Germany, there were concerns that the Rhine River had become so low that shipping might be affected. In the Balkans, the Danube was already reported to be so low that the remains of sunken World War II ships were visible.
The hot winds continued to fan fires in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and France. In Italy, firefighters used water-carrying planes and helicopters to try to douse flames in Tuscany and the Amalfi coast.
The fires have been blamed for most of the deaths, including those of 14 people in Portugal since last month and a dozen more in Spain. In Britain this week, the heat is said to have caused the deaths of two teenage boys who drowned while trying to cool off. Likewise, the weather is being cited for the death Monday of a 32-year-old man who collapsed in southwestern France.
At the Parc de Thoisy zoo in Les Yvelines outside Paris -- where the animals generally roam more freely than at most zoos -- founder Paul de La Panouse found a novel way to keep the animals cool and fed: fish and chicken popsicles.
By freezing mackerels in ice, he has been able to give the bears a treat while cooling them off. And he said he invented a similar iced "chicken sorbet" for the tigers. "The tigers just love that, because the carnivores only cool down through their tongue," de La Panouse said.
Not all furry creatures were faring so well, though, even in canine-friendly Paris. At the Philippe Dubois dog-grooming shop, an employee said many pet owners were calling to cancel their appointments. "They just don't want to go out of their home, no matter what the dog feels," she said. "They think about themselves first."
Special correspondents Caroline Huot and Maite Selignan contributed to this report.
Swimmers and sunbathers jam the beach at Nice, on the French Riviera, as temperatures reached 98 degrees.
