With nature and a camera

Chapter IV. Gamekeepers: their friends and foes

Partridge call

Partridges are very curious-tempered birds, and will often forsake a nest full of eggs for no other reason, apparently, than that it has been discovered. By careful stalking, we secured the picture of a partridge as she sat on her eggs in a hedge bank, without disturbing her.

The birds are poached in various ways, and in most of them some well known natural habit is turned to account in order to encompass their destruction.

In the evening the mother of a covey calls her chickens together to "jug" in a small circle with their tails all turned inwards towards the centre. The old male generally sleeps a little apart by himself, and acts sentinel; but in spite of his vigilance a couple of poachers will, with the assistance of a long net, often kill his mate and all their offspring. The net is dragged along the ground with the top well forward, and directly a covey attempts to rise it is dropped over them and they are doomed. To prevent this kind of destruction gamekeepers "bush" the fields in August, and thus save their game.

Partridges are, like Grouse, amenable to an artificially-produced call if their peculiar skirling cry be successfully imitated. A Surrey farmer once told me that he had in years gone by lain in the corner of a field and lured lots of birds within shot by means of a call made and used in the following way: He took an ordinary sewing-thimble, and grinding the end away, tied a piece of parchment over the hole so tightly as to render it resonant, and making a pin-hole through the centre, threaded it on to a piece of catgut or horsehair. By holding one end of the catgut or horsehair between the teeth and the other round the index finger of either hand, he could by moving the thimble up and down reproduce the call-note of a Partridge. In order to prove the value of this information before making use of it, I constructed a call for myself, and was surprised by its effective strains.

Partridge (photographed on the Westmorland Hills after a storm)