Manors fit for an Englishman

Restoring our grey partridges and the farmland ecology they depend on reaps conservation rewards far beyond just a shootable surplus of the gamebird, as work on four pioneering partridge manors proves

- JOE DIMBLE BY OF THE GWCT

In the age of the pheasant a wild grey partridge day is unknown to most guns. But it was not long ago that it was the quarry of rich and poor alike, both driven on grand days hosted on great estates and walked-up over farmers’ fields. Here since the past ice age, this native gamebird would have been familiar to all countrymen and celebrated across the land, from Cornwall to Caithness. During the first half of the 20th century, there were more than one million pairs of grey partridge. Today, only 43,000 pairs remain with a 92% decline from 1967 to 2015.

This dramatic fall in numbers is intrinsically linked to the modernisation of farming and has made the grey partridge a barometer for the health of our countryside. Projects that manage to improve its fortunes show huge increases in biodiversity, with fields full of songbirds, bees and butterflies providing fantastic examples of game management as a driver for conservation. The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) Partridge Count Scheme (PCS), which started in the 1930s, showed that between 2000 to 2015 partridge numbers dropped nationally by 54% whereas they rose by 91% on PCS sites with a shoot and only dropped 18% on those without a shoot.