Just wanted to post this photograph of one of my escaped partridge cocks which jumped up on the dyke behind my office in the evening sun a few minutes ago. My breeding stock wintered well, but when a few birds escaped last month, a sparrowhawk took great relish in killing all the hens but one. Continue reading

Further damage from the storm has included the escape of almost my entire breeding stock of partridges. As I type this, there is almost a constant cacophony of skreiking and growling coming from the garden, where the fugitives are mingling with the hens and picking small fights with one another. I am trying to catch Continue reading

After almost five months working with a number of broody hens to produce partridge poults, it’s been very interesting to see the variety of attitudes different individual birds have to rearing their chicks. Some mothers (the best ones) are attentive, communicative and light-footed around their tiny charges, while others never seem to form a bond Continue reading

After three months of constant laying, my four pairs of breeding partridges have laid almost precisely three hundred eggs. I’m now just gathering up the last odds and ends, and feeling rather like I’ve been hit by a bus. They produced more than double the eggs I was expecting, and although now is probably not Continue reading

What an all-consuming process this partridge rearing has become. I must apologise to my grousey readers, since this blog has become a chronicle of partridge rearing during the past few weeks, but while it seems to be a diversion, there are always grouse at the heart of this project. And even if there weren’t, trying Continue reading

The partridge which began sitting a few weeks ago has been impressively steadfast in her attempts to incubate the plastic eggs I gave her. So much so that I replaced them with real eggs on day 22 of a 24 day incubation process this morning. I had imagined that she wouldn’t tolerate my being anywhere Continue reading

To celebrate their third week, it’s worth including this picture of my first batch of partridge chicks, which are now thriving in a ten foot square pen. I realised too late that I should have made the clutch sizes bigger for each broodie, since I now have three hens with just eight chicks each – Continue reading

It has now been several weeks since my first partridge egg. I have ten clutches either hatched or due to hatch and was finally beginning to feel a little exhausted by it all when I found that one pair had finally stopped laying. A hint of relief crossed my mind, and I imagined that the Continue reading

Now that my first batch of partridges is almost a week old, they have been moved into new accomodation. For their first week, the broodie hen was restricted in her coop and the chicks were allowed to come and go as they pleased onto a small area of grass bounded by paving slabs. During the Continue reading

It gives me some considerable pleasure to report that the first hatch of my “home-bred” grey partridges took place on Thursday. The hatch was due to happen on Tuesday, but when the moment of arrival came and went, I began to get worried. The eggs had all pipped, but there was nothing to be seen Continue reading