One should perhaps be a bit more wary of milestones — spotting them too often is a sign of fog or of going round in circles — but there do seem to be grounds for hoping that the international conference on the conservation of wetlands and waterfowl, held at Ramsar on the Caspian Sea, last February, is a genuine milestone on one of conservation's more difficult roads. Certainly this was the view of the half-dozen participants who, eight years ago, attended the MAR Conference at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue, which began the campaign for recognition of the importance of conserving 'marshes, bogs and other wetlands' — hitherto almost universally regarded as wasteful nuisances, or even menaces to health, to be drained at the first possible moment.

Last year the Indian Government imposed a total ban on the export of tiger and leopard skins, and goods made from such skins. Also all the Indian states banned tiger shooting — none too soon — and possibly too late, for the latest census figures suggest that tigers may now have dropped as low as 1500 for the whole of India. In this article, written in the first place for the Junior Statesman in India, Anne Wright, our FPS correspondent in India and a member of the Cat Group of the Survival Service Commission, who lives hi Calcutta, describes what she saw on several visits to the back streets of Calcutta. This explains one of the biggest drams on tigers and leopards in India.

‘The most brightly coloured of all living mammals, an intense shimmering golden yellow’, is Osman Hill's description of the golden lion marmoset Leontideus rosalia, one of three closely related species restricted to Brazil (the others are chrysopygus and chrysomelas). Once they were widely distributed in the coastal forests; today they are reduced to small remnants, two of them at least with a very precarious future. John Perry, Chairman of the Survival Service Commission’s Zoo Group and Secretary of WAPT (Wild Animal Propagation Trust) in the USA, reports here on their status following his recent visit to Brazil.

In the December 1970 Oryx we published an article by Dr Laws on his elephant research in the Tsavo National Park. This was written in 1968, and in this additional note he summarises the findings of later research, both by him and by other research workers, which support its conclusions, and also comments on the article by Dr P. E. Glover, Botanist Warden of the Tsavo Research Project, published in the September 1970 Oryx.

The lion-tailed macaque of southern India is in danger; even in 1963 there were probably fewer than a thousand in the wild. But zoos have found them easy to obtain, and a survey this year showed 79 in US zoos. The author, who is Associate Curator of Mammals at San Diego Zoo, having visited India and seen how precarious was the monkey's situation in the wild, proposed that AAZPA (American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums) should consider starting a captive breeding project using animals already in American zoos. In September 1970 AAZPA agreed to do this and also placed restrictions on imports of the macaque by its members. The author is chairman of the committee that is running the project, and appeals for European and other zoos to take part.

Until 1966 the parma or white-throated wallaby Macropus parma was believed to have been extinct in Australia for over thirty years. But in that year the authors discovered a considerable number on the New Zealand island of Kawau, where they had been introduced a century ago, as described in Oryx December 1969. Like other wallabies they had been shot and poisoned in considerable numbers because of the damage they do to tree seedlings and agricultural land, but the authors are hopeful that management plans now in hand will ensure their survival unmolested.

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.