Early in 1972 the author visited Tunisia at the request of the British Council to study all aspects of nature conservation. This article is a brief résumé of his report.

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:

The nduk or Vosseier's eagle owl Bubo vosseleri is known from only eight specimens in one area of Tanzania. No ornithologist has ever certainly seen this owl in the wild, and nothing is known about its status. But the author, who lived in the area for several years, fears that numbers must be small and are bound to be affected by the steady destruction of the forest that is going on.

Covering more than a million and a half acres, Los Glaciares National Park in Patagonia has great possibilities as a wildlife sanctuary. But fanning, sport and hunting take precedence over wildlife except in the highest parts that are difficult of access. The author spent a month in the park in 1971, making a film for BBC television.

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.

The black lechwe of northern Zambia are today confined entirely to one area, the Bangweulu floodplain. Numbers have shrunk from more than half-a-million as recently as 50 years ago to an estimated 16,000 today. The authors, who have been engaged in a 3½-year research project on these lechwe, are able to show that the numbers today are well below the carrying capacity of the floodplains, and that poaching is the cause. The highly specialised lechwe is the only mammal capable of exploiting the high fertility of the floodplain, which could support ten times the present numbers. Allowed to increase and properly managed on sustained yield principles, the black lechwe could provide a large quantity of badly needed protein in Zambia.

The successful breeding of hawksbill turtles on experimental farms on islands in the Torres Strait, north of Australia, has persuaded the islanders to leave the turtle eggs (formerly taken for food) for the farms. The author argues the case for using eggs from the wild in these particular areas, and also urges the importance of allowing a turtle industry that will bring profit to the islanders—and no one else.

In this report on his field survey of Ethiopian hartebeests, two of which—Swayne's, now extinct outside Ethiopia, and the tora—are in the Red Data Book, Melvin Bolton describes the known populations and recommends the appropriate conservation measures. His most encouraging discovery was a population—unfortunately in a heavily cultivated area—of at least 500 Swayne's hartebeest, bringing the estimated total for this subspecies to 600—700. His study shows that it is not always easy to ascribe all hartebeests to the three main subspecies or races, and he describes two intergrades with distinctive features. The field work was helped with small grants from the FPS and the WWF.