It is arguable that the most brilliant single idea in wildlife conservation in the past quarter of a century has been the Red Data Books for endangered species. They are certainly the most widely known activity of IUCN, and were the brainchild of Sir Peter Scott, for many years Chairman of IUCN's Survival Service Commission and now, among many other distinctions, President of the ffPS. The first RDBs, compiled by Noel Simon for mammals and Jack Vincent for birds, were published in 1966. The amount of material available, together with the accelerating slide of so many animals towards extinction, soon made the original horse-and-buggy arrangements for compiling the RDBs out of date, and there was a serious possibility that they would cease to be regarded as the authoritative works of reference they had become. Fortunately there were sufficient concerned people to persuade WWF and IUCN into financing the Species Conservation Monitoring Unit at Cambridge (now part of the IUCN Conservation Monitoring Centre), and for the first time the RDB operation was properly housed, staffed and equipped.

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.

In the 1970s, under Idi Amin's rule, poaching decimated mammal populations in Uganda and, as a result of the drop in browsing and grazing pressure, uniform scrub and woodland are replacing the species-rich grasslands.

January 31, 1982 was a milestone in the long struggle to save Oryx leucoryx from extinction in the wild. On that day ten Arabian oryx, nine of them born and bred in the United States, were released into the open desert in Oman. The release was a triumph for Operation Oryx, launched almost 20 years earlier, in April 1962, by the Fauna Preservation Society, as it then was; in Oman it was also a day of rejoicing for the Harasis tribe, who will once again guard their white oryx in the Jidda al Harasis, and for Sultan Qaboos bin Said, whose generous support and cooperation made the return possible.

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.