Shooting season blighted by partridge shortage
GAME shooting is facing its most problematic season since the Second World War due to an acute shortage of birds. This comes off the back of two seasons disrupted by covid, plus a serious avian-flu outbreak across the main game-rearing areas in south-west France, which means that many shoots are unable to obtain partridge poults. Some have cancelled the entire season and others are operating far fewer days.
Tim Weston of the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation (NGO) says this season is set to be ‘even more challenging than [those affected by] covid. Other than the Second World War, this is the biggest decrease that shooting has ever seen. Some shoots have had to close and, unfortunately, there have been some redundancies’.
Game-shooting coach and writer Simon Reinhold agrees that the situation is ‘very serious’, with shooting ‘pole-axed’ by a ‘perfect storm’ of bird flu in the Vendée Atlantique and Loire (where the bulk of eggs and poults reared in this country come from) and the
