To understand the interior of British Columbia the reader must realize that the white man's history there is short, for Alex Mackenzie was the first white man to make his way overland to the Bella Coola Valley in 1793. Three years later, on his journey to the Pacific Ocean, he followed the Mackenzie River to Mackenzie Bay on the Beaufert Sea.

To secure international action to stop oil pollution of the sea the British Government has invited some forty other maritime countries to send representatives to a conference in London in April. For years the pollution by oil of coastal waters and of the shores of Britain and other countries has been an expensive nuisance to humanity and has led to the lingering and horrible death of countless sea birds. It has now become intolerable. It is true that since 1922 discharge of oil within three miles of the coast has been legally prohibited and that in 1926 shipowners of many countries voluntarily adopted a 50-mile limit. Unfortunately little success has rewarded these efforts.

With the tragic death, through a shooting accident, of the 12th Duke of Bedford on the 9th October, 1953, the Fauna Preservation Society has lost one of its most able members, for not only was he keenly interested in anything connected with the preservation of wild life, but at Woburn he was also actively engaged in preserving certain species of ruminants that might otherwise have been lost to mankind for ever.

The period from 1942 till 1950.—During the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, the damage to the protected fauna and flora was not catastrophic. The capture of animals for export came to a standstill and the possession of fire-arms was prohibited. Before the war, in Java alone, there were more than 60,000 registered hunting rifles, not to mention un-registered rifles. On the other hand illegal clearing of forest ran riot during the occupation and unlawful hunting without firearms became common. Nevertheless more damage to fauna and flora was done from 1945 till the end of 1949—that is after the Japanese occupation. But even this period of chaos and lack of the slightest spark of interest in nature conservation, did not lead to irreparable damage to game reserves or to wild life.

Seldom would one think of going down a river by car, but it all depends on the river and on the car. “Bush-busting” with two four-wheel drive cars for 20 miles from Kimathena brought us to the palm-fringed banks of the Tiva—a dry water-course with a wide expanse of gleaming sand, washed white by successive rainy seasons.

A convention for the protection of the fauna and flora of Africa was drawn up at a conference held in London in 1933 and was ratified by almost all the Powers with possessions in Africa. Another conference took place about five years later, which recommended certain alterations in the convention, but owing to the war these were never carried into effect. Since then it has been obvious that the time for further action was overdue.

Like that of several other British mammals the distribution of the polecat has not yet been fully investigated. For one thing, being a creature of the night and mainly haunting sparsely inhabited uplands or the wilder parts of the lowlands, it is a difficult and often inaccessible subject for study. There is the further complication that ferrets, which are apparently not descended from our polecat but, some authorities say, from a North African species, have for many centuries been escaping and crossing with wild polecats so that perhaps nowhere can the polecat be claimed to be a “pure” species. Besides, rabbiters frequently interbreed tame polecats with ferrets. The resulting polecat-ferrets, usually piebald creatures, have been used for rabbiting in various parts of Britain, where many have escaped and formed local populations of “polecats”. This spread of polecat-ferrets has been much accelerated by the intensification of rabbiting which has taken place since 1939 and accounts for the many recent “polecat” records from areas known not to hold true wild polecats : the Home Counties, the Isle of Man, Mull, etc. Since these hybrids usually show much cream on back, head, or flanks, it might be thought that, being easily separated from genuine polecats, they would not complicate the distribution-map. Unfortunately some of these hybrids, and we do not know how numerous they may be, are all dark and indistinguishable from wild polecats. There are several apparently reliable accounts from central Wales of white female ferrets going wild for a few weeks and eventually returning to captivity leading families of absolutely dark young “polecats”. And since these may quite easily be sold elsewhere in Britain, it is not surprising that very genuine looking “polecats” turn up in unexpected places.

My home was on the edge of Epping Forest and my father, the late Edward North Buxton, was a very active verderer of that forest for practically the whole of his life. He was moreover in the forefront of the fight to save the forest as an open space for the public. From very early days I was constantly in the forest and at once began to take an interest in its deer.