Man and mongoose between them have decimated several endemic reptile and mammal species in Jamaica. This paper, the result of a survey early last year, describes the present status of the one land mammal, the hutia, and all the reptiles currently recognised as endangered, and suggests a few more to add to the endangered list.

With a total population estimated at under 500, mostly living in forests that are constantly under threat of felling, the Bokharan deer or hangu1 is in serious danger of extinction. This is a red deer subspecies confined to the Turkmenistan —Afghanistan frontier region, and closely akin to the Kashmir hangul described in Oryx, December 1970. In this survey Professor Bannikov and Dr Zhirnov summarise what is known about it and its present status, and point to the rgent need for active protection measures.

Anyone who has ever kept orang-utans would agree that they are the most lovable and fascinating of animals. Their sad expressions and reserved ways give them a depth of character rare outside our own species. Man's interest in them has been great for hundreds of years and cave deposits from Sarawak show that our ancestors of thirty thousand years ago shared this interest. Yet the orang-utan or ‘man of the woods’ has now become the rarest, most threatened and least understood of all the apes.

In pre-Columbian times vicuñas ranged in their hundreds of thousands in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador; the Incas harvested their valuable wool by rounding them up and shearing them. Today a mere remnant survives, almost entirely in Peru and Bolivia. Urged by conservationists, notably Sr Felipe Benavides, FPS Vice-president and WWF Trustee, Peru and, later, Bolivia have taken steps to save the vicuña by prohibiting the export of the wool, and creating reserves; last year, in response to their request, the British Government banned all imports of vicuña wool, a move in which the FPS played a considerable part (see Oryx, December 1970, page 343). In 1969 Dr. Jungius with another biologist was sent by UNESCO, following a request for advice and help from the Bolivian Government; in 1971 he went out a second time, supported by the Frankfurt Zoological Society and WWF.

In the article ‘New Attitudes in Nigeria’, by John Henshaw and Gilbert S. Child (Oryx 11, 4: 275–283) there are some errors which I should like to correct, although lack of information on the distribution of many species makes it difficult to be precise.

In Ghana wildlife is valued especially as a source of meat. But overhunting has led to serious depletion of nearly all game species, in some cases almost to the point of extermination. However, the Government is now concerned that the country's wildlife should be conserved and used on a sustained yield basis, and recently new national parks have been created, existing reserves enlarged and government spending on wildlife substantially increased. The author, who is head of the Wildlife Department and FPS correspondent in Ghana, describes the difficulties of making conservation effective in a country where ignorance about wildlife, other than its value for the pot, is the rule.

Until 1963 the main population of the northern square-lipped (white) rhino was in the Garamba National Park, in the Congo (now Zaire) where they had increased to over 1200. That year armed rebels occupied the park, and when three years later they had been driven out, the rhinos had been drastically reduced: numbers were thought to be below 50. Dr. Curry-Iindahl describes what he found in 1966 and 1967.

The Chilean pudu Pudu pudu, the smallest American deer, is on the world list of endangered species in the IUCN Red Data Book. One of its few remaining refuges is in the Vicente Perez Rosales National Park. This is in the Lake District of southern Chile, the ‘Switzerland of South America’, between the Puyehue National Park to the north, and the Nahuel Huapi National Park in Argentina on the east. There are very few records on the fauna of this park, which covers 243,000 hectares, and is part of the Patagonian Subdivision of the Neotropical Faunal Region.

Exterminated in Finland in the 19th century, a number of wild reindeer crossed the frontier into Russia, and a small population built up there. But after the war development in their new Russian habitat drove the reindeer away; some crossed back into Finland where now there is once again a small population close to the frontier. But forestry operations on both sides of the frontier threaten them with extermination again and only the preservation of their habitat can save them. The animals have a special importance because they are quite uncontaminated by domestic stock.

The dry savannas of southern Brazil are difficult to exploit, being easily overgrazed. This article describes an experiment started in 1969 by a well-known Brazilian conservationist to establish the African eland as a meat-producing animal on this type of land.

The authors spent three months in the Virunga volcanoes, in Rwanda, making a census of mountain gorilla groups as an aid to Dian Fossey’s long-term studies of this highly endangered primate. The FPS assisted this census with a grant from the Oryx 100% Fund.

The James’s or lesser Andean flamingo Phoenicoparrus jamesi is undoubtedly the world’s rarest flamingo. Very little is known of its habits, status or distribution, mainly because of the extreme isolation of its usual haunts in the high semi-desert wilderness region of the southern Bolivian Andes. The birds have never been recorded below 9000 feet.