Bog Myrtle & Peat

Perhaps the greatest joy of my entire dalliance with grey partridges came a month ago when the nerve biting moment came to open the pop-hole and be damned. Feeling horribly protective of my dear little charges, the moment quickly arrived when they could no longer depend upon the security of the electric fence. The A-frame was growing foul with shit and spoilt food and if they had been cooped up in there for any longer then eyes would have started to narrow and shoulders would have begun to hunch. Nothing looks worse than an ill partridge (and I’ve seen quite a few this summer), and while I’m proud to have lost a surprisingly small amount of birds, the one thing I’ve learnt is that partridges take no pleasure in being cooped up in a space that is too small for them. As much as I slept easier at night knowing that they were safe in a vermin-proof cocoon, the time was fast approaching when the apron strings had to be cut.

After a week in their A-frame on the hill, I opened the pop-hole door and sat back to watch my three week old birds emerge into the sunlight. Cautiously, but with growing confidence, they emerged from the little door and out into the rushes. A scar left by a tractor track provided a bare patch of earth which encouraged a few exploratory pecks from the boldest bird, before they all descended keenly into a period of intensely pleasurable dust bathing.

Watching her well-beloved brood slip out through the narrow rungs of the pop-hole, the broody hen was distraught. She tried to follow but found her shoulders were too wide. As a compromise, she jumped up onto the coop and clucked enthusiastically at them. All was proceeding according to plan until one of the little chicks stood up and bleated in shrill imitation of an adult partridge. In a second, the dust bath was over. With a fixed twinkle of determination in its eye, the pioneer took off and flew away. Like a star-burst, eight other chicks took to the sky with a whirring of wings that was quite out of proportion to their pipit-sized bodies. Flying to all points of the compass, I felt my heart fall through the seat of my trousers. Here were my birds, irretrievably losing themselves in a forest of rushes. As if to rub salt into the wound, one of the birds landed seventy yards away, then took off and flew another thirty. Fighting every urge to try and gather them back together and shepherd them home to safety like an over-protective father, I slumped miserably into the grass and thought of how the broody and I had both just wasted seven weeks of our lives.

As it turned out, I am extremely glad that I didn’t run off around them like some sad old collie dog. It would only have caused chaos at a time when some subtle and extremely interesting communication was going on. The broody started to cluck slowly and deliberately, and I heard the distinctive chirrup of partridges calling to one another. Like some vision in a dream, all of the little birds had returned to the mouth of the pop hole within three minutes. It was pure magic, and it made all the many hours of work and worry seem like petty niggles.

That was a month ago and I have since merged two more broods of eight chicks into the first. Rather than separate into their respective groups at night time, they all adopted the same mother and I took the other two hens home after two nights when they had nothing to brood. One chick went funny and died, but otherwise there is now a good covey of twenty three poults living in the field, ranging across more than an acre of rushy ground. They return to the hen to be brooded at night time, and I now notice that on mild nights, they sleep beside her or in a separate small clump. In the last couple of days when the weather has been so warm, the sleep out of the pen on the bare soil of the game cover. When it rains or when the wind gets up, they jostle to get below the hen, but it won’t be long before she can come down from the hill altogether.

These little birds have come on so well, and looking at this picture (above), it’s hard to imagine that this bird was an egg in my hands less than two months ago.