A survey has been carried out on the status of bats in Britain. Of the 14 species, the status of two, the greater horseshoe and mouse-eared bats, is precarious. The survival of these and other cavernicolous species depends on the availability of underground roosts, many of which are being destroyed, or rendered uninhabitable by extensive disturbance during hibernation. Where such disturbance is prevented by a grille at the cave entrance, the number of bats using the roost increases. There is a trade in cave-dwelling bats for museums, schools and research. Large numbers of pipistrelles and other species are killed each year in buildings. In many cases, the slaughter is fruitless because the roost is subsequently reoccupied. Ignorance and fear of bats is widespread among members of the public. With the decrease in deciduous trees, fewer roosts are available for tree-dwelling species.

The seriously endangered Mediterranean monk seal has not been recorded off Libya since 1810. Mr Norris lived in Libya in 1966–68, and is able to report regular offshore sightings on the inaccessible Marmarican coast, two occasions in the early 1960s when a ‘strange fish’ with ‘whiskers like a man’ and a cry ‘like a woman’ hauled up on a beach within Tobruk harbour, and one established breeding colony of 20 or more animals living in submarine offshore caves, known to local fishermen and never molested by them.

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.

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.

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.

Artificial insemination is widely used throughout the world in the breeding of domestic animals. Why should not this technique be adapted and applied to build up populations of rare and endangered species?