At this year's International Whaling Commission meeting, where ‘horse trading’ between whalers and conservationists was again a conspicuous feature, sperm whales got a respite, but at the expense of the North Atlantic fin whales. For the British ngo-s, banded together in Wildlife Link (which includes ffPS), the main disappointment was the failure of all three major proposals to halt whaling altogether. They now look to a future where hunting has been given up for lack of whales to hunt, and whale-watching takes over. A remarkable feature of the meetings was the leadership of the Seychelles Government, which last year succeded in getting the Indian Ocean Sanctuary for whales.

Since the last report on the work of the Mountain Gorilla Project (Oryx, August 1980), all the three main programmes in Rwanda – conservation education, park protection and park development – have made substantial progress.

The author, who is a scientist at the Zoological Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, describes the serious plight of China's endemic alligator. This last summer he was joined by an American research scientist, Dr Myrna E. Watanabe, in a further study of the alligator, and we hope to carry their report in a later issue.

The slaughter and capture of hundreds of millions of migrating north European birds in the Mediterranean region have long been a major conservation problem. The worst havoc is in Malta, which subscribes to none of the bird protection conventions, and where the main recreation is to shoot anything large enough to stuff, and to catch anything smaller and put it in a cage.

After a canoe journey down the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, the author concludes that the river canyon is ‘a viable ecosystem with a rich natural assemblage of large mammals’. But it is only the canyon's inaccessibility that protects the animals, and he wonders how long it will do so.

Old ‘unimproved’ meadowland is increasingly scarce in Britain’s intensively farmed land. Dr Jennifer Rees, an Open University tutor married to a farmer who breeds pedigree cattle on 100 acres in the Wye Valley, recently won the Sunday Times Kenneth Allsop Memorial Essay Competition with an essay that pinpoints the value of a ‘great natural re-usable resource that can be replenished year after year at minimal cost’.

After searching many remote regions in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, the author discovered that the island's last two endemic mammals, formerly believed to be rare, are in fact common in some areas. But human pressures on the hutia Plagiodonria aedium and the solenodon S. paradoxus are such that, unless the Governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic take effective steps both could soon become extinct.

The brown bears in and around Italy's Abruzzo National Park live quite comfortably with the fairly dense human population surrounding the park. The people like the bears, even though they eat sheep, and are not afraid of them. But these same people also favour economic development, notably tourism, and tourists have now increased to the point where the disturbance they create is a serious threat to the bears. In particular tourist pressure in high summer has driven the bears to scatter into areas where they have little protection.

Because they must migrate up to the headwaters of rivers to spawn, salmon were badly affected when man developed the rivers for navigation and industry, then polluted them and, for hydroelectric schemes, sometimes blocked them. The final disaster was the Greenland fishery that started in the early 1960s. This has now been controlled, but the Atlantic salmon is unlikely to recover its former numbers. Moreover, some of the unique stocks that each river system originally had have been exterminated and others adulterated, so that the Atlantic salmon's original genetic diversity has been irretrievably destroyed. The author, who works on fishes at the British Museum, Natural History, is Chairman of IUCN's SSC Fish Group.

After nearly ten years of civil war Zimbabwe now has more elephants than at any time since at least the 1940s: the bush was simply too dangerous for the poachers. Much wildlife management too had to be suspended during the war. Now in the Wankie National Park there is considerable elephant damage as a result of the population pressure, and some culling has been done.

Once abundant throughout its range, the medicinal leech became endangered largely because it was so widely used by doctors for blood-letting in the 19th century. France alone imported more than a thousand million over the century. Since then demands for research purposes have greatly increased following the discovery that this leech contains a potentially very valuable anticoagulant of human blood. Protection for the species is urgently needed, says the author. One school class could unknowingly wipe out the whole of a small remnant population.

By the end of the 19th century the vast grasslands that once covered nearly two-fifths of the US land surface had almost disappeared, turned over to cultivation. Today some of the very few surviving remnants are being saved, but they are unlikely to be enough to support the full range of prairie species, and since the 1930s efforts have been made to create new prairies. Because prairie is prime habitat for cranes, many of which are endangered, the International Crane Foundation, as part of its Ecosystem Restoration Programme started in 1979, is planting a prairie in Wisconsin. The author, who is in charge of this, describes the methods and results so far.

In the summer of 1980 four members of the University of London Natural History Society went to Lake Alyki in Macedonia to study a population of tortoises Testudo hermanni. Such studies are urgently needed because very little is known about the ecology of Mediterranean tortoises, which are declining seriously, due mainly to habitat loss and collecting for the pet trade. The expedition chose Alyki after an expedition by the same society in 1979 had reported an exceptionally rich wildlife there including a large tortoise population. A new holiday village nearby did not appear to threaten the main wildlife areas, and a commercial salt works only operated at the north end of the lake from which access to the heath was not easy. However, unknown to the four members, the 1980 expedition had walked into an explosive situation. The following account is quoted from their report.

So far as is known pygmy chimpanzees, or bonobos, occupy only a comparatively small area in the central basin of Zaire. A large multinational company has acquired logging rights in what is believed to be the core of their range, and the authors, who have been studying the animals, believe that this could mean the end of this major population. A reserve is urgently needed, and they suggest a particular area of undisturbed primary forest where the local people would act as guardians and also continue their traditional uses.

The southern pudu Pudu pudu, a small forest deer, now occurs only in the temperate Valdivian rainforests of Chile and Argentina. Ninety per cent of its historic habitat, the lowland forest, has been occupied and cleared by man, bringing the pudu increasingly into contact with both man and his domestic livestock. This, coupled with increased predation, livestock diseases and competition from introduced exotic deer, has made the pudu extremely rare and locally extinct in many areas, especially in Argentina. In the IUCN Red Data Book it is classed as vulnerable.