Showing papers in "Oryx in 1981"

Why We Need to Save the Medicinal Leech

Abstract: 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.

New Locality for the Yellow-tailed Woolly Monkey

Abstract: The authors found a small number of yellow-tailed woolly monkeys in a part of Peru 200 kilometres from where in 1974 the species was ‘rediscovered’ (having been believed extinct). As the area is also the home of a number of endemic Peruvian birds, they suggest it may have been a refugium in the late Pleistocene and should be both protected and explored for other possible undescribed species.

Last Endemic Mammals in Hispaniola

Abstract: 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.

Black Rhino Disaster in Tanzania

Abstract: The black rhino will be exterminated soon in northern Tanzania if poaching is not stopped, says the author, after surveying eight national parks and game reserves, either from the air or on the ground, or both. Tanzania is making great efforts to stop the poaching, but essential equipment is desperately short, and much more outside help is needed.

Apes on The Rock

Abstract: Barbary macaques have been on Gibraltar continuously for 240 years, maybe longer. Today they are a major tourist attraction – 1000 people may visit them in a day. But they have caused much trouble in the past, raiding gardens, damaging houses, biting people. Since 1913, with few breaks, they have been fed regularly on the top of the Rock by the British Army. Numbers have fluctuated – in 1900 there were 130, in 1943 only four, which on Mr Churchill's instructions were increased by imports to 24. Today they are kept at between 30 and 40, and controlled by exports to zoos and culling, which the author, who is studying their adaptation to living with man, considers unacceptably wasteful.

Spectacled Bears in Peru

Abstract: Land nationalisation, starting in 1963, brought settlers and cultivation into mountain areas of Peru where hitherto spectacled bears had been disturbed only by occasional hunting. This greatly reduced the numbers of bears, and also habituated those that survived to eating the farm crops and farm animals that replaced their natural foods, thus incurring the wrath of the farmers who replied with guns. Moreover, bears are becoming isolated from each other, in some cases confined to high ridges surrounded by cultivated land. The author, who spent two years studying the spectacled bear in Peru, believes that as a result, fewer bears will be able to breed and that genetic variation will be reduced.

Elephant Losses in Uganda – and Some Gains

Abstract: In the eight years of Idi Amin's rule, law enforcement in the national parks and reserves completely collapsed, and poaching and human encroachment increased. Last year, Robert Malpas, working for the New York Zoological Society and World Wildlife Fund/IUCN, and with some help from ffPS, spent nine months on a survey of Uganda's national parks and reserves to determine just how bad the situation really was. He found the elephant situation so desperate in both the Rwenzori and Kabalega Falls National Parks, except in one area, that there is no certainty of their survival in either even if the poaching can be controlled.

Pygmy Chimpanzees in Peril

Abstract: 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.

Elephants and the War in Zimbabwe

Abstract: 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.

Dilemma of the Abruzzo Bears

Abstract: 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.

Fur Seals Return to Gough Island

Abstract: After a somewhat perilous landing on Gough Island, south of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, the author was able to confirm the remarkable comeback of the fur seals there, once heavily exploited but now numbering over a hundred thousand.

Mountain Gorilla Project: Progress Report 4

Abstract: 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.

A World Like Our Own by Alison Jolly. Yale University Press, £18.90.

Abstract: Madagascar should really be a continent. In size, perhaps, it is not on a truly continental scale, though being a thousand miles long, it is by no means inconsiderable. But by most qualitative criteria zoological, botanical, ethnographic it is a land on its own. Ninety per cent of the plants in the forests occur nowhere else in the world. Four families of birds, five of mammal exist only here. Its most famous inhabitants, perhaps, are those engaging primitive primates, the lemurs, and there are some twenty different endemic species here, most of which are now rare. All these organisms owe their existence to the fact that Madagascar split from the flank of Africa some hundred million years ago, with the result that the community of animals and plants that populated it at that time has, since then, continued to evolve in isolation. So here is a world with a character as absorbing and as individual as any isolated continent in the world, including Australia. Yet, astonishingly, the island is still comparatively little known. This book is, effectively, the first comprehensive popular survey in English. Dr Jolly is an international authority on lemurs, and these fascinating creatures figure conspicuously in her pages. But she also writes illuminatingly about the botany and the geology, the ethnology and the ornithology, and sets her accounts in the context of a recent five-month journey through the island. Her text is generously illustrated by Russ Kinne's photographs (though he has not been altogether well served by his publishers who, in some cases, have reproduced what appears to have been splendid colour originals in rather muddy black and white). Dr Jolly's message is an alarming one. Over the past few centuries, the human inhabitants of Madagascar have devastated their land by shifting agriculture and fire. The island has now lost 80 per cent of its unique forest cover and with it, inevitably, the creatures that lived in it. And the process is still continuing. The Malagasy Government, faced with crippling economic problems, is being forced to adopt policies that may bring some slight easement today but certain ecological catastrophe tomorrow. They are not alone in doing that. Other far richer governments, with far less excuse, are daily guilty of such short-sighted expediency. Some say that conservation is faced with painful strategic decisions. Everything in the world that is in danger cannot now be saved. Choices must be made. Small regional variations may have to be abandoned provided the main population of the species is secure. The world's major efforts and funds must be concentrated on creatures which are the last representatives not merely of their species but their genus or even their family, in a last-ditch attempt to retain what we can of the biological diversity of the world. In this important book, Dr Jolly shows only too vividly that Madagascar must be reckoned one of the most important priorities in the conservation battle and, tragically, that it is a place where, at this very moment, that battle is close to being lost. DAVID ATTENBOROUGH

The African Fish Eagle, by Leslie Brown. Bailey Bros & Swinfen, £8.50.

Abstract: Madagascar should really be a continent. In size, perhaps, it is not on a truly continental scale, though being a thousand miles long, it is by no means inconsiderable. But by most qualitative criteria zoological, botanical, ethnographic it is a land on its own. Ninety per cent of the plants in the forests occur nowhere else in the world. Four families of birds, five of mammal exist only here. Its most famous inhabitants, perhaps, are those engaging primitive primates, the lemurs, and there are some twenty different endemic species here, most of which are now rare. All these organisms owe their existence to the fact that Madagascar split from the flank of Africa some hundred million years ago, with the result that the community of animals and plants that populated it at that time has, since then, continued to evolve in isolation. So here is a world with a character as absorbing and as individual as any isolated continent in the world, including Australia. Yet, astonishingly, the island is still comparatively little known. This book is, effectively, the first comprehensive popular survey in English. Dr Jolly is an international authority on lemurs, and these fascinating creatures figure conspicuously in her pages. But she also writes illuminatingly about the botany and the geology, the ethnology and the ornithology, and sets her accounts in the context of a recent five-month journey through the island. Her text is generously illustrated by Russ Kinne's photographs (though he has not been altogether well served by his publishers who, in some cases, have reproduced what appears to have been splendid colour originals in rather muddy black and white). Dr Jolly's message is an alarming one. Over the past few centuries, the human inhabitants of Madagascar have devastated their land by shifting agriculture and fire. The island has now lost 80 per cent of its unique forest cover and with it, inevitably, the creatures that lived in it. And the process is still continuing. The Malagasy Government, faced with crippling economic problems, is being forced to adopt policies that may bring some slight easement today but certain ecological catastrophe tomorrow. They are not alone in doing that. Other far richer governments, with far less excuse, are daily guilty of such short-sighted expediency. Some say that conservation is faced with painful strategic decisions. Everything in the world that is in danger cannot now be saved. Choices must be made. Small regional variations may have to be abandoned provided the main population of the species is secure. The world's major efforts and funds must be concentrated on creatures which are the last representatives not merely of their species but their genus or even their family, in a last-ditch attempt to retain what we can of the biological diversity of the world. In this important book, Dr Jolly shows only too vividly that Madagascar must be reckoned one of the most important priorities in the conservation battle and, tragically, that it is a place where, at this very moment, that battle is close to being lost. DAVID ATTENBOROUGH

Restoring American Prairie

Abstract: 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.