The 7th meeting of the Scientific and Technical Review Panel (STRP) -- the party on the terrace!

STRP7 met on 29-30 April 1998 and generated another awful mess of ideas, suggestions, proposals, wishes and dreams, summaries, declarations, decisions, indecisions, and of course Minutes, as well as Summaries of the Minutes -- all of which create burdens for everybody for the next year or more -- draft decisions, agenda papers, guidelines and methodologies, yadda, yadda -- but in any case the meeting was certainly fun whilst it lasted.

Even better than the meeting itself, if you can believe it, was the reception held on the terrace behind the IUCN headquarters building in Gland, Switzerland.

Julia Tucker, Bureau Administrator, is also the party administrator, and administered this one as well.  Elizabeth Salter (right) heads back to the snacks table again, whilst Mihály Végh (background) call home to his own planet.

Excess of conviviality under the towering concrete beauty of Switzerland.

Dave Pritchard, RSPB and BirdLife International, entertains the gathering with a recitation in heroic couplets of passages from his recent study of the implementation of the Ramsar Convention in Trinidad and Tobago.

Mihály Végh (Hungary) seeks words to express how much happier he is out on the sun-drenched terrace than cloistered up crowded and dark in the meeting room.

Elizabeth Salter (WWF), a invited specialist in endocrine disrupters and other toxic nightmares, had all the STRP participants eyeing the plastic bottles of mineral water dubiously, and dejectedly, but had nothing bad to say about glass bottles or wineglasses. Julia Tucker (left) affects surprise, again.

Wetland Conservation begins to seem fun again, at least to Max Finlayson (Australia), but Montserrat Carbonell of the Bureau (left) is not yet convinced.  Rebecca D'Cruz (back to camera) is edging away warily.

Altogether, an excellent meeting, and a better party.

Brought to you by . . .

All photos by Valerie Higgins and Paulette Kennedy, Ramsar Bureau.