The caribou is a typical Arctic animal, like a reindeer but with longer legs. In late autumn both animals appear very sturdy because of lengthening hair and accumulating fat. The caribou is specially adapted to its environment in many ways; its large broad hoofs support its weight on crusted snow and the concavity of the sole of the hoof makes it sure-footed on ice.

The world's first National Park was the Yellowstone Park in the United States of America, established by the United States Congress in 1872 “as a pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people”. This great Park, of over two million acres, was soon followed by others, first in America and then elsewhere, in a world-wide movement which has gradually been gaining impetus and which still continues, East and Central Africa being amongst the last and most tardy recruits to the field. Throughout, the emphasis has been on the preservation of wild land areas for public outdoor recreational and educational use. In 1933 the first move was made at international level to give tangible expression to this movement in the “Conference for the Protection of the Fauna and Flora of Africa”, held in London during that year and attended by delegates from all over the continent: other international meetings have followed.

In the United States there are the following principal categories of nature reserves: national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges and Taylor Grazing Act districts.

In national parks nature is left to her own devices, unless interference is essential, to control, for example, a superabundance of grazing animals which are ravaging their food supply. Trees are not cut, nor dead ones removed. Roads and buildings are made as inconspicuous as possible. Wildlife refuges are managed for the benefit of the species for which they have been established, usually upland or water birds. National forests were originally established for watershed protection and timber supply.

A former chief of the Nigeria Forest Service once told me that a boyhood fascination for R. M. Ballantyne's book The Gorilla Hunters was one important deciding factor in his choice of tropical forestry as a career. I cannot claim any such romantic incentive in the choice of a career but nonetheless when I found myself in charge of a territory containing the habitat of one of the few remaining gorilla colonies in the Commonwealth, I was more than interested at the prospect of visiting the area and possibly observing these animals in their haunts.

In the autumn of last year my husband and I had an opportunity of exploring the park which was named after his father in 1937. Tweedsmuir Park is set in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia, which so many people confuse with the Rockies. In fact, the Rockies, which form an almost continuous chain reaching southwards to Mexico, lie further to the east. Between their high jagged summits and the Pacific are a large number of mountain outcrops, each with its own name. There are three such in Tweedsmuir Park: the Quanchus, the Pattullo and the Rainbow ranges. Together they form the Coast Mountains of British Columbia.

When the current reindeer experiment in Scotland is discussed I am sometimes asked: “Why try to introduce, or reintroduce, reindeer when there are probably as many red deer as the ground can carry and certainly more than the black-faced-sheep farmers want ?”

On my first visit to Scotland, nearly ten years ago, I was very proud to catch a glimpse of red deer grazing in the Spey valley. “The monarch of the glen” on a crag is a stately sight, or a herd galloping with heads held high. After the rut, on the other hand, stags become “lean as herons”, to quote David Stephen.

Hydro-electric schemes and their effect on landscape and habitat loom large in the view of nature conservators to-day. During the latest meeting of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature at Edinburgh in June, 1956, those attending were able to see something of the work of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, and to judge for themselves its effect on the countryside.

In their Checklist of Palacarctic and Indian Mammals, 1758 to 1946, issued in 1951, J. R. Ellerman and T. C. S. Morrison-Scott regard the true sheep of the Old World as all belonging to the genus Ovis and, except for the Bighorn Sheep of Siberia and Canada, all to the sub-genus Ovis also. They allow four species: Ovis ammon, the Argali; Ovis orientalis, the Asiatic Mouflon; Ovis laristanica, the Laristan Sheep, and Ovis musimon, the Mouflon.