You’ve got to pick a partridge…
I ONCE asked a hugely experienced picker-up – a retired gamekeeper with a team of four labradors and three spaniels – what he regarded as the most challenging retrieving he ever asks his dogs to do. His answer came back as quick as a Derby winner on the home straight: September partridges. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting, so I asked him to explain why it was so much more difficult than, say, August grouse or January pheasants.
The biggest problem, he told me, was that many birds so early in the
