The Orang-utan or Maias, Pongo pygmaeus, which lives only in the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, is one of the animals in greatest danger of extermination throughout the world. The threat comes from the demand for young captive orangs. These are normally obtained by shooting the mother, so that, remembering also the numbers of baby orangs which must be killed accidentally with their mothers or die in transit later from disease or undernourishment, it is reasonable to estimate that for every orang to reach its final destination in captivity, at least three perish.

In the Pechero-Ilych National Park, at the foot of the Ural Mountains in northern European Russia, where a 3-foot snow cover may lie for seven months of the year, experiments in the domestication of elk have been going on for some years. In this article the Director of the Park and his senior research worker describe the wildlife of this large Park, covering 2,758 square miles, and the history of the domesticated elk herd, and estimate the herd's value in the economy of the taiga. The Park gets its name from two rivers which form the western and southern boundaries. A third river, the Kozhim forms the northern boundary, and the Urals the eastern.

Ruthless killing by white men brought the wood, or northern, bison which once ranged from Edmonton, Alberta, north to Great Slave Lake, within sight of extinction, as it did the plains bison further south in the U.S.A. In 1893 the Canadian Government instituted a policy of conservation. Wood Buffalo Park was declared a protected area, and in 1906 the Government bought 600 plains bison in the U.S.A. and established them at Wainwright. These were so successful that twenty years later 6,000 were taken to Wood Buffalo Park. Here they interbred with the wood bison, and it was feared that the wood bison would disappear as a distinct subspecies. In 1957, however, a small isolated group of wood bison were discovered in a remote part of Wood Buffalo Park, and these are being kept separate. Miss Egerton studied the social behaviour of the North American bison while employed as a graduate student in the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, from September, 1960, to December, 1962. In this paper, while mentioning some aspects of bison behaviour, she is concerned mainly with the history and present standing of the species in Alberta.

An experimental research project is being carried out at Bako National Park in Sarawak to devise means by which young orphaned orang-utans can be re-established to wild living.

“ Gale warnings for sea areas Fastnet, Shannon, Rockall”—we all know the familiar phrase. But where is Fastnet, and what is it? It is a tiny lump of rock set in the Atlantic four miles beyond Cape Clear Island, which would otherwise be the southern tip of Ireland. Like “The Cape”, as the island is known locally, it was once part of a ridge of hills running south-west from somewhere near Skibbereen; but the land has sunk and been broken into a line of islands forming the south side of one of the “rias bays” of west Cork and Kerry.