Wild excitement

A thriving grey partridge population in a little corner of north-east Dorset proves the value of a truly joined-up approach to conservation

- MIKE SWAN

It’s been a funny old summer in so many ways. Many things have come together on my little Dorset rough shoot in a way that I had long hoped for, but not really expected.

With harvest all but over, I have been cruising the stubbles and, lo and behold, we have some wild game. Indeed, I think we can look back on our best wild-bird breeding season in quite a few years.

I had a suspicion that we would record a better than average year for pheasants quite a while ago, when we started seeing decent broods on the tracks and in other little open areas back in June. These were mostly about three weeks old, indicating a late-May hatch from first clutches laid in April.

A horrid, wet winter had turned rapidly into a fine, warm spring and lockdown had given me a bit of extra time to set about my spring predation control programme.

Since then, the weather has been a bit more variable, but overall the warm and dry conditions prevailed, with just enough rain to keep things growing. If it gets too hot and dry, the vital chick-food insects can be scarce and hungry chicks never do well. So right on cue, we started to see a brood or two of partridges as well. I don’t quite know if we will have a shootable surplus yet, but I have a hunch that we might be able to allow ourselves to harvest a brace or two.

Reversal of fortune

When I first took on the shoot jointly with my great friend Charles Nodder in the spring of 1997, I rashly suggested that we could turn around the fortunes of the small grey partridge population in this little corner of north-east Dorset. We never really did, but our success was in not losing them completely when all around the numbers have been falling.