The Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos has as its most urgent duty the protection of the remaining giant tortoises, which, besides being one of the most interesting and spectacular elements in the unique fauna, and giving the islands their name, are at present in greater danger of extinction than any other native animals. Accurate knowledge of their present status is a prerequisite of conservation, and this is not easy to obtain in the extremely difficult terrain where most of the surviving tortoises live. This paper summarises very briefly the previously available information: its main purpose is to present the new information which has been obtained in the last year and a half (time of writing, August, 1964), to discuss the factors threatening their continued existence, and to outline the conservation measures which have already been taken and those that are planned for the future.

Discovered less than a hundred years ago, the Persian fallow deer Dama mesopotamica is in serious danger of becoming extinct. Mr. Pepper describes this large deer and the little that is known of its history, and urges the need for establishing a captive herd based on the two females in a German zoo, the only ones in captivity.

Discovered by seal hunters at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian monk seal was slaughtered with such thoroughness that by the end of the century it was almost extinct. Since then it has slowly built up again to a population of about 1,200 in 1958. This is the total world population. Dale Rice studied the breeding behaviour of this monk seal when working on the albatrosses in Hawaii as a wildlife biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Today he is in charge of whale research at the Marine Mammal Biological Laboratory in Seattle. The article is reproduced by kind permission from “Natural History” journal of the American Museum of Natural History.

In the Pechero-Ilych National Park, at the foot of the Ural Mountains in northern European Russia, where a 3-foot snow cover may lie for seven months of the year, experiments in the domestication of elk have been going on for some years. In this article the Director of the Park and his senior research worker describe the wildlife of this large Park, covering 2,758 square miles, and the history of the domesticated elk herd, and estimate the herd's value in the economy of the taiga. The Park gets its name from two rivers which form the western and southern boundaries. A third river, the Kozhim forms the northern boundary, and the Urals the eastern.

Ruthless killing by white men brought the wood, or northern, bison which once ranged from Edmonton, Alberta, north to Great Slave Lake, within sight of extinction, as it did the plains bison further south in the U.S.A. In 1893 the Canadian Government instituted a policy of conservation. Wood Buffalo Park was declared a protected area, and in 1906 the Government bought 600 plains bison in the U.S.A. and established them at Wainwright. These were so successful that twenty years later 6,000 were taken to Wood Buffalo Park. Here they interbred with the wood bison, and it was feared that the wood bison would disappear as a distinct subspecies. In 1957, however, a small isolated group of wood bison were discovered in a remote part of Wood Buffalo Park, and these are being kept separate. Miss Egerton studied the social behaviour of the North American bison while employed as a graduate student in the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, from September, 1960, to December, 1962. In this paper, while mentioning some aspects of bison behaviour, she is concerned mainly with the history and present standing of the species in Alberta.