As that ever-popular Christmas song rings out in village squares and churches across the UK, our partridge population continues its steady decline. Patrick Galbraith finds out why this once-common farmland bird is increasingly rare
The sun is fast falling away towards the fields, turning the water in the tractor ruts golden, and somewhere up ahead, in a strip of mustard crop, a cock bird is calling. “It’s just this time of year, in the last few days before Christmas,” says retired gamekeeper Gerald Gray, as though telling me a secret, “when grey partridges might start pairing up. Particularly if there’s a bit of weather on the way.”
We’re in the middle of the Hilborough Estate in Norfolk, where a healthy population of grey partridges is holding on. There are no signs, but you know you have arrived at Hilborough because there are rough margins round the edge of every field and dense hedges sprawl almost three metres wide. It’s farming as it once was and it’s everything grey partridges need to thrive.
“There they go,” Gerald says quietly as we get to the end of the mustard. I try to count them but they are too fast, and then they’re gone, curling away over the knapped flint wall.
Every December, school concerts ring out with that merry melody ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. The first verse puts a partridge squarely in a pear tree (see page 36), but the song’s ornithological rigour is a little lacking. If you were to spot a grey partridge in a pear tree, you would be looking at an oddity. Partridges tend to be found under hedges, in hay meadows, scratching around field margins and running across stubble.
As I watched that covey – meaning a small group of gamebirds, from the French word coove, ‘a hatching’ – disappearing into the autumn light, I was reminded why people talk about “the flash of silver”. The plumage on their backs is a sort of smudgy brown and when grey partridges burst into the air, they blend into their habitat well, but the feathers on their chest are chalky grey, which creates an effect like a flash of silver when the birds are on the wing in the sun.
Partridges, on the ground, are often described as dumpy, but I don’t see it, really. There is something charming about the way they run with their little legs, and males are fierce. There are few more enthralling sights than partridge cocks chasing each other then rolling around in clouds of dust and feathers in order to establish dominance.
Francis Buner, a Swiss ornithologist who leads on grey partridges at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, thinks it’s amusing that people in Britain call grey partridges ‘English’ partridges. They are native to Britain but also to Eastern Europe. Perhaps people in Britain like to imagine we have the same qualities as grey partridges. As monogamous birds, they are very loyal, and there are few braver creatures than a cock grey defending its nest. Cocks also display admirable single-mindedness when displaying to females. They stand tall, puff their chests out and flick their tails up and down. They are sometimes so preoccupied with looking handsome that they are plucked off the ground by raptors. I wonder if it’s this sort of chivalry that makes Brits determined to claim them.
The partridge’s scratchy “kut-kutkutting” call was once a common sound across the UK, but in the past few decades the population has declined by 65% to just 35,000 pairs. Last summer, while I was writing my book In Search of One Last Song, I went for a wander around Sussex with Francis. “There were so many of them,” he told me, “that you have no imagination how many millions there were. It was the most common farmland bird.”
The causes of their decline are many. Insecticides have destroyed an essential food source – particularly for chicks – and hedges, which are vital habitat, have been ripped up to enlarge fields. The transition to winter cropping has also been catastrophic; fields are now often ploughed up and drilled after harvest rather than being left until spring. Grey partridge food, both grain and weed seeds, is abundant among winter stubble, but on cultivated ground there is little for them. Put simply, as farming has become more efficient, life has become hard for England’s greys.
LIFE CYCLE OF A GREY PARTRIDGE
The hen lays a clutch of around 15 eggs – one of the most prolific layers of all British birds. Losses are typical. Nests tend to be found in grassy margins, hedge bottoms and rough corners. For the first three weeks of their life, partridge chicks survive on protein-rich insects, so insecticides are bad news for them.
It’s said that hen birds lay in Royal Ascot week, in the middle of June. If it rained at Ascot, rural people would say, “it’ll be a bad year for greys”. Both parents tend the young and the male is plucky. Cock birds have been recorded flying at weasels and stoats, while hens will feign a broken wing in order to draw away predators.
RED-LEGGED INVASION
Part of the reason greys are called English is to differentiate them from the ubiquitous red-legged partridge. It’s believed the red-legged was first imported by King Charles II in the 1600s, as he liked to hunt them for the table. But it’s said that greys taste better. Tim Maddams, the former head chef at River Cottage, tells me that for his money, grey partridge is the sweetest game meat going. Mrs Beeton, the Victorian food writer, included an array of partridge recipes, which would have been made with greys, in her 1861 book Mrs Beeton’s Household Management. The most intriguing is potted partridge, which consists of slow-cooking birds in spiced butter then shredding the meat, to be spread on toast. Interestingly, Mrs Beeton describes grey partridges as “timorous birds, being easily taken”. Most gamekeepers, however, would disagree. A lot of the grey partridge’s prestige as quarry was because of the way coveys ‘starburst’ every which way when they see the guns.
SURVIVAL STRATEGY
When gamekeeper Gerald Gray was a little boy, he remembers red-leggeds, which breed well in captivity, starting to be released in large numbers. In fact, it was something his grandfather – akeeper too and a great traditionalist – thought totally wrong.
Inevitably, there were years when greys didn’t breed successfully, often due to bad weather, which meant estates didn’t shoot in order to avoid wiping out breeding stock. But, clearly, no such delayed gratification is necessary when you are simply putting red-legged partridges down. Vast numbers can be released to allow shooting to go ahead every season, but the eventual consequence is that fragile populations of greys are shot out – mere collateral among large bags of French birds.
Ironically, though, in some places, shooting is also the very reason that greys are still scratching around at all. In the spring of 2021, I drove to Gloucestershire to count greys with Frank Snudden, a young keeper and passionate conservationist. Every year, for a week in spring, Frank heads out every day at dawn to count pairs on 688 hectares. In just seven years, through habitat management, sensitive farming and predator control, Frank has managed to increase partridge pairs on his patch from 16 to over 100. The key, he explained, as we sat there in the fog, is being able to tell landowners that they aren’t going to be able to shoot if birds haven’t bred well. An old-fashioned keeper’s priority was to protect his birds at all costs.
On paper, it’s simple – we need to release fewer red-leggeds, we need to create more habitat and we need to keep predators in check. But in reality, saving greys is a puzzle that requires a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of dogged passion.
A PARTRIDGE – IN A PEAR TREE ?
If you see a partridge in a pear tree, make sure you take a photo – partridges are famously floor-dwelling. In Greek mythology, Daedalus the architect throws his nephew, Perdix, off a cliff. The goddess, Athena, magics Perdix into a partridge, hence the bird’s latin name Perdix perdix. Ever after that, nephew-bird is terrified of heights and lives on the floor.
Nonetheless, the first verse of that Christmas classic ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, sets the partridge firmly in a pear tree. It might simply be that an older version included both the French and English for the species, “a partridge, un perdrix”, and that over time ‘un perdrix’ became corrupted into ‘in a pear tree’.
In a darker vein, it has been suggested that the song was a Catholic catechism from the 16th century, a period when possessing Catholic literature in England could lead to imprisonment. The partridge might represent Christ, nailed to the cross.
Patrick Galbraith is editor of The Shooting Times.
His first book, In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s Disappearing Birds and the People Trying to Save Them (Harper Collins) is out now.
FIELD GUIDE
Alectoris rufa
Perdix perdix
Grey partridge cock birds can be identified by the chestnut marking in the middle of their breast. The male often stands, while the hen – they pair for life – hunkers down next to him. The slightly larger red-legged has pinker legs than the grey’s. One of the easiest ways to confirm you have seen a grey is the scratchy, cheeping call it makes on the wing. They weigh about the same as a wood pigeon, but their wings are shorter.