OSME News 
OSME AGM1993 
The fifteenth Annual General Meeting will be held on Saturday 17th July 
1993, in the Palaeontology Demonstration Room, Natural History 
Museum, Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London. Doors open at 
1 .00 pm for a 1 .35 pm start. Full details are to be found on the programme 
enclosed with this Bulletin. Your programme entitles you to free entry to 
the Museum for the meeting. 
Progress with Important Bird Areas in the Middle East 
Mike Evans 
Since the project started in October 1991, participants have put together 
key information on at least 117 Important Bird Areas (IB As) out of an 
estimated total of perhaps 450 in the region. There is still a large amount 
of work to do if the IBA book is to be published by the end of 1993. The 
rate of data compilation is now greatly increasing as people and 
organisations from all Middle Eastern countries become involved and 
make their contribution. 
Some countries have already virtually completed the job of identifying 
and writing up the details of their IBAs, notably (numbers of IBAs in 
brackets) Kuwait (8), Bahrain (3), Jordan (17) and Lebanon (4). Substantial 
progress towards this goal has been made by contributers for the United 
Arab Emirates (20), Oman (33), Afghanistan (18) and Israel. Still in the 
early stages of data compilation are Syria (2), Qatar (2), Yemen (10) and 
Iraq. Data compilation is only just starting for the two giants of the region, 
Saudi Arabia and Iran, but this is not too worrying, given the co- 
operation of Saudi's NCWCD and Iran's DoE. 
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