Pie still remains in the sky as far as the hard-pressed fin whale is concerned, following the 26th meeting of the International Whaling Commission in London in June. But the sky has got perceptibly nearer. After the 1973 IWC meeting fin whaling stood to end in 1976; now it should end in 1975—provided the outcome of an Australian resolution is not denounced by Japan and Russia under the 90-day rule that makes the IWC so ineffective. The Australian resolution provided for a total moratorium on all protection stocks, defined as stocks whose annual increment does not maintain the population, so that the fin whale seems bound to be included. The other whales currently being hunted, the sei, minke and sperm whales, are still within the maximum sustainable yield, but there is every reason to fear that, if whaling continues, they too will have to be classed as protection stocks.

There is at present no national park in any part of peninsular Arabia. The FPS therefore welcomed the chance to help Dr Harrison and Major Gallagher formulate their plans for a park in Oman to help save the Arabian tahr and also pioneer the idea of national parks in the Arab world. The FPS approached the Omani authorities, who readily agreed to allow Major Gallagher to make the preliminary survey, and the Society is also sponsoring the proposed scientific expedition in April 1975 described in this article. Michael Gallagher's photograph above was taken in the area.

The Society's tour to Rwanda and Zaïre, in July, broke new ground both for the Society and for any British wildlife tour. The fifteen members who took part were rewarded by, among other things, a wonderful experience of mountain gorillas at ten-foot range and a ring-side view of a live volcano. Sir Hugh was leader of the party.

The author has been studying the evidence for both the yeti, the ‘abominable snowman’ of the Himalayas, and the sasquatch of British Columbia for many years and has written two books on the subject. Are they fact or myth? She suggests that the evidence so far collected, including Russian references hitherto little known in the west, justifies further research to find out.

The largest concentration of Swayne's hartebeest, a race found only in Ethiopia, of which not more than 1000 animals are believed to survive, is threatened by spreading cultivation and the introduction of mechanised farming. The Wildlife Conservation Organisation of Ethiopia decided to translocate as many as possible to safer areas, and this year succeeded in taking 203 to the Awash National Park and to Nachisar where a park is projected. In this article the Deputy Chief Game Warden describes the operation.

The numbers of both these highly endangered monkeys, found only on the Tana River in north-east Kenya, are down to about 2000, possibly fewer. The authors of this status and habitat survey describe the continuing threats to both animals and make proposals for a reserve to protect them.

Elephants still occur in the large Indonesian island of Sumatra, but mostly in small groups of up to seven animals. In the northern province of Aceh the author, after a two-year study, estimates that numbers are now less than a third of what they were 35 years ago. He sees the best hope for their future in scientific management geared to culling the wild populations for working animals, as is done in India.

Both agoutis and the babassu palm thrive in secondary growth where primary rain forest has been removed, as is happening widely in South America, notably in Brazil. The agouti is also a prolific and easily farmed animal that provides good meat. The author suggests that fanning of this native mammal would be much more likely than beef to succeed among the settlers coming in along Brazil's newly bulldozed roads.

More than 95 per cent of Hawaii's original fauna and flora occurs nowhere else in the world. In 1965 the compiler of the Birds Red Data Book, Jack Vincent, listed 25 of Hawaii's original 69 bird species as extinct. With the discovery of a new not yet named Honeycreeper (Drepanidiae) on Maui in 1973, by a National Science Foundation sponsored expedition and the re-discovery of the Maui nukupuu Hemignathus lucidus effinus in 1967, the count changed to 70 known species with 24 extinct. Of Hawaii's remaining 46 endemic birds 27 are threatened with extinction.

The dodo which once inhabited Mauritius has become the very symbol of extinction by man. Today, nearly 300 years after the last dodo was killed, a unique endemic fauna still survives on the island, but it is now seriously threatened; one species, the Mauritius kestrel, is believed to be down to six in the wild. The author, who has been studying Mauritian conservation problems for the past two years, describes the situation, what has been done to conserve the wildlife, and what is planned.

The Sengwa Research Area in north-west Rhodesia consists of 145 square miles of uninhabited woodland and flood-plain, virtually undisturbed by man and now set aside solely for wildlife research. The author describes the government Research Station and the work going on there, particularly on warthogs, in which he took part in 1972–73.

Sierra Leone has no national parks or equivalent reserves. Dr Wilkinson is a geologist who worked first in the north and north-east, the Koinadugu District, where the forest destruction and hunting pressure on the larger mammals combined to endorse the gloomy picture painted by Dr Lowes in Oryx, September 1970, page 309. Later, working further to the east, he found the situation rather better and was able to tot up a list of twenty-nine mammals seen. He suggests, now that diamonds, Sierra Leone's staple earner of foreign exchange, are rapidly giving out, that the tourist industry is bound to burgeon and game parks will be needed. He writes:

Mr N. O. J. Abel, Acting Chief Wildlife Research Officer in Zambia, has sent these comments on the Introduction and Postscript to Mary Gough's paper on the Luangwa Valley in Oryx, October 1973.