Information on the present population and status of the Indian Wild Ass Equus hemionus khur Lesson, 1827, is scanty. For this reason I was prompted to undertake this brief fact-finding survey, especially as South African Horse Sickness had been reported in that part of India recently. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources sponsored my expedition, and the World Wildlife Fund very kindly paid my travelling expenses from the eastern part of India to the furthest western tip of the country.

This article summarizes some of the results of a visit paid to the West Nile District of Uganda in July-August, 1962, with the object of studying the White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) in its native habitat. Its conclusions are based both upon official departmental reports and upon information received privately from officers of the Uganda Game and Agriculture Departments, from residents in the West Nile District and from others, to whom individual acknowledgment is made below.

The prospect of game-farming or game-cropping is very much in the news in parts of Africa to-day, as a means of conserving wild life and at the same time managing it so as to provide a supply of meat and other animal products. It is, therefore, very interesting to see how the Russians have succeeded in rescuing from extermination an animal only recently in grave danger of becoming extinct, and in converting it, in the space of a few years, into a major national resource. The animal at the centre of this exciting and encouraging story is the saiga, a small steppe antelope (Saiga tatarica). Sometimes called the big-nosed saiga, this antelope is found only in the U.S.S.R. It has a body length of 120 to 135 cm., stands 75 to 80 cm. at the shoulder, and weighs 40 to 45 kg. Its natural habitat is the steppe, an environment eminently suitable for a population of social ungulates.

In December, 1962, during a brief stay in Japan I visited the north island of Hokkaido in order to see the Japanese Cranes which are carefully preserved near the seaport of Kushiro. A forty minute bus ride takes you to the nature park where five cranes which have been pinioned are enclosed in an area of grass and brushwood enclosed by a high fence. Another forty minutes by bus takes you further up the river valley to the neighbourhood of the small town of Akan. On farms in this area I saw thirty-three of the wild cranes. A recent census put the total for the whole crane population at 186 birds for the whole island.

The African continent with its remarkable wealth of large mammals represents a zoological community which is unique in the world. For many centuries it has been a hunter’s paradise and since the dawn of human history in Africa, the wild animals of this vast continent were hunted by primitive man. Despite the toll taken by the super-predator the great herds of game encountered by the earliest European explorers bore ample testimony to the supposition that man and beast subsisted in perfect harmony in their chosen habitats, and the primitive hunter in fact occupied an important niche in the natural order.

The progressive loss of marshes, bogs and others wetlands through drainage and “improvement” led the Executive Board and the Ecology Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature to undertake a special project—project MAR—on the conservation and management of temperate wetlands. As with their African Special Project, the work is divided into three stages. First came the collection of data on the status and importance of wetlands and the methods by which they might most profitably be conserved: also the compiling of an inventory of important wetland areas in Europe and north-west Africa.