Of partridges & pear trees
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
