MY FATHER remembers wild grey partridges regularly bursting from cover and spooking his horse as he hacked home from days with the Hampshire hunt in the early 1960s. I’m sure many Field readers will, like him, recall the thrill of disturbing this beautiful native gamebird while out riding or walking-up a hedgerow. Go back further to the establishment of the GWCT Partridge Count Scheme (PCS), celebrating its 90th birthday this year, and the experience would have been even more universal, with annual reports being published on prospects for the wild partridge season in every county in Britain. Just as the song of the curlew is associated with the uplands, the partridge’s distinctive rasping call was part of the soundtrack of British farmland. Back then, as well as being the quarry of kings on the great partridge manors of Norfolk, the English partridge was the mainstay of the farmer’s shoot and the pinnacle of walked-up sport for the pot hunter.
And yet it only took a generation to decimate the population. In 1933 there were more than a million pairscountryside. In 1998 it was expanded to members of the farming community who wanted to conserve partridges, but not as a game species, increasing the number of participants from 84 in 1998 to 855 in 2012.
