In February 1978 the story broke in Europe and America of the killing of Digit, a wild mountain gorilla known by millions outside Rwanda through his appearance on television with Dr Dian Fossey, the American zoologist who has been studying gorillas in the Virunga Volcanoes for eleven years. FPS immediately set up an appeal for funds, to protect the gorillas. This was promoted by the Sunday Times and collected nearly £8000, some from school conservation clubs sending all their savings. Encouraged by this splendid response FPS decided to launch a major Mountain Gorilla Project to help Rwanda to guard the gorillas and the Parc National des Volcans. The goal is £50,000.

But before this could be launched, FPS, working in close association with WWF, needed up-to-date information on the situation in Rwanda and decided to send a small mission to report. The members were Professor Kai Curry-Lindahl, FPS Vice President, world-renowned scientist and conservationist who has worked in the Virungas at intervals since 1952 and knows the problems, especially on the Zaire side; Dr A.H. Harcourt, Coordinator of the Mountain Gorilla Project, who studied gorillas for two years in the Virungas and knew Digit well, and Brian Jackman, whose story in the Sunday Times on the death of Digit was mainly responsible for the money so far donated. They arrived in Rwanda in early August to be greeted with the news that two more gorillas of Dian Fossey's study groups, including “Uncle Bert”, had been killed. They spent a week on their mission, and extracts from their report to FPS are printed below. Since Sabena Airlines very generously backed the mission, travel expenses were minimal and none came out of the Mountain Gorilla Fund. The following are extracts from the Mission's report.

The leopard Panthera pardus tulliana survives in south-west Turkey, but after a two-month survey there for the World Wildlife Fund, the author shows that numbers are so small and the people's attitudes so hostile that this subspecies is probably doomed to extinction; leopards found in eastern Turkey are the Persian subspecies saxicolor. Other large predators are disappearing too, and the author urges the need to establish several large reserves, for which the Turkish Government's planned wildlife survey will provide the data.

At its 30th meeting, in London in June 1978, the International Whaling Commission began to stumble towards its end as a useful regulator of the whale stocks of the world. In classic Parkinsonian style, it has acquired a full-time secretariat and new offices just at the point when, after thirty years' neglect of its duty to conserve the whale stocks of the world, it has almost no function left. Only the sperm whale stocks remain as anything like the basis of a prosperous whaling industry. Small-scale local coastal whale fisheries will no doubt continue for some years; being less efficient, they take longer to exterminate the stocks on which they depend for their livelihood.

Between 1970 and 1972 the East African Wildlife Society removed 38 roan antelope to the Shimba Hills National Reserve, near Mombasa, because their habitat in central Kenya was about to be destroyed. Since then the author has visited the reserve several times to study the roan. In 1973 she could find only eight; in 1976 there were 13, but by 1978 numbers had risen to 22. She suggests that, while most of the practical problems of translocating wild animals have been solved, there are many species about whose social organisation very little is known, and this may have been the main reason for the initial lack of success with the roan. But now they are threatened by the Forest Department's policy of planting the grasslands with pines.

The FPS Honorary Secretary represented both the FPS and the British National Appeal of WWF at the meetings of the International Whaling Commission, in Canberra, Australia, in June 1977. The FPS Statement to the IWC called again for a moratorium on whaling, as proposed at Stockholm in 1972, and commented: ‘It is a sobering thought to consider how much larger the whale stocks and quotas were in 1972 than they are today’.

The wildlife of the Jordanian deserts was shot out in the 1950s. As a first step towards restoring it, the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature in Jordan has set up a captive breeding unit at its Shaumari Reserve, eight miles from the great oasis of Azraq. Though the first occupants are likely to be gazelles, by the time this issue appears there may well be four male Arabian oryx also. These, the foundation of what it is hoped will be the first captive herd of Arabian oryx in Arabia deriving from Operation Oryx, have been presented to Jordan by the Trustees of the World Herd of Arabian Oryx, now located at Phoenix and San Diego Zoos in the USA. There are a number of other captive herds of local origin already in the Arabian peninsula, including the well known one in Qatar.

The Arabian oryx may now be extinct in the wild. If so it was exterminated by hunters in four-wheel drive vehicles using automatic weapons. Fortunately the species has bred well in captivity thanks largely to the 1962 FPS Operation Oryx, and now animals bred in the USA are becoming available for return to the wild where practicable. Jordan has already embarked on such a project, and Oman, home of the last oryx herds in Arabia, is now planning to release oryx in the Jiddat al Harasis, a vast stony plateau where the last known wild Arabian oryx were killed. In February 1977, at the request of the Oman Government, Dr Jungius, as Director of WWF's Department of Conservation, made a feasibility study, from the report of which the following article is extracted, followed up by a more detailed investigation in March 1978. One most encouraging aspect of the scheme is that the Harasis people regard the oryx as their tribal property. They want the oryx to return, and are prepared to guard them.

Almost every one of the speakers at the FPS'Mammal Society Symposium on mammal conservation in February made the point, directly or implicitly, that as man continues to press ever greater demands on the earth's space and resources, other animals to survive will have either to be of use to him, adapt to live alongside him, or be preserved by him in small remnant populations. Dr Keith Eltringham, for example, suggested that one way to conserve the African elephant would be to domesticate it. Its only economic values today are as a tourist attraction and a source of ivory – the one undependable and the other destructive – while much of the land that elephants occupy is coveted by a burgeoning human population. In many places elephants only exist by courtesy of man, who, as he becomes hard-pressed, may only continue t o extend this courtesy if he gets an economic return.

The Director of National Parks in Senegal and a well-known European conservationist survey the wildlife, especially mammals, of this conservation-conscious West African country, where three new national parks have been declared in the last eighteen months. One of the highlights of the enormous Niokolo-Koba park is the giant Lord Derby's eland Taurotragus derbianus of which there are now over 400.

The chamois in the Appennine Mountains of central Italy are reduced to under 400 animals scattered in a few places in the Abruzzo National Park. Shooting outside the park and the presence of livestock and shepherd dogs make it impossible for the chamois to spread. A field study is now being made and reinrroductions are planned.

The author is a biologist working in Chad with WWF support. He explains why he sees the new deep boreholes for watering cattle, installed on the edge of the Sahel by international aid, as the greatest single threat to the survival of arid-land wildlife, especially the scimitar-horned oryx.

In western Spain, especially in Extremadura, the typical Mediterranean flora and fauna are more abundant, both in species and numbers, than almost anywhere else in the Mediterranean region. For Europe’s birds of prey it is a key area. But all, especially the birds of prey, are gravely threatened, despite excellent protection laws, by reafforestation (with eucalyptus and pines) and industrial development destroying their habitats. The authors, who spent a total of ten months between 1970 and 1977 studying the birds of prey in the region, stress the urgent need to protect at least some of this superb country, which includes primeval cork oak forests and natural vegetation undisturbed by man.