English partridges at Burnham Thorpe
A chick-fostering programme and rigorous predator control are creating a thriving partridge manor at this Norfolk estate
Editor Jonathan Young visits a thriving shoot in Norfolk
There are many sounds that sing to the sportsman’s soul. The soft whistle of wigeon drifting over saltmarsh, the roar of stags in mist-clad glens and the subterranean thump of rabbit about to bolt are music to our heathen hearts unequalled by any Glyndebourne aria. Yet a case could
be made that nothing is so heart-thumpingly exciting as two simple peeps on an Acme whistle heralding the imminent arrival of a covey of wild English partridges. We were standing within two long shots of All Saints’ church, Burnham Thorpe, where Nelson’s father had served as rector, a line of eight guns that had walked with funereal silence into a watermeadow bordering a fir shelterbelt. Twenty minutes earlier, headkeeper Nick Yarham had gathered his men, experienced wild-game
beaters reinforced by keeper friends from Holkham, and bundled down the narrow lanes in the beater wagon. They, too, were silent as they plodded steadily towards us in thin October sunshine, adding to the suspense, the waiting of curtains to open on a unique sporting performance.
At that moment we might perhaps have suffered a little stage fright or at least an excessive squeezing of barrels. We’d shot wild game all our lives, were experienced with the snap shot at woodcock, the teal
dropping in near-darkness, the November grouse hurtling big and black through the butts. But we knew how many patient years had passed waiting for this day, the countless hours creating cover crops and conservation headlands, the dawn to dusks of constant predator control.
Our shoot captain, Nick Zoll, being generous and gentlemanly, would not of course remark on errant marksmanship. He’d grin and say, “Well, they beat you that time boys.” He would, however, have the inner disappointment of a sommelier seeing Coke added to Lafite ’82.
I stood on the end of the line at No 8, 20yd out from the belt. A pigeon clattered over, the blur of movement making me swing through but the trigger stayed unpulled. An early pigeon now would deservedly earn a serious rollocking. Almost immediately followed a trio of fieldfares, then a couple more, obviously roused by the beating line.
“Soon,” I thought, “soon,” and raised my gun to the half port. Twenty seconds later, the first double peep cut through the silence, a covey star-shelled over the fir belt and two folded to my two shots. We all shoot best instinctively when there’s no time to engage brain. A quick reload, another two urgent whistles and the second covey broke between my neighbour and myself. The second shot went wide this time but that was three down now. Another couple of blasts of the Acme, a third covey burst over John Hamblin on No 7, who dropped his brace. The hidden beating line pushed farther along, sending coveys over John Browning, Gerwyn Jones and the Earl of Leicester, all of whom shot with the deftness of long experience.
SECOND DRIVE
There was little time bouquet tossing, however, as Zoll was anxious to reach the second drive, a short walk from the first. There was sufficient fold in the land here to show proper longtails, which proliferate under Yarham’s diligent keepering.
“As many of the pheasants are wild and fully feathered we could easily shoot them at the beginning of October,” said Zoll, “but they’re even better at the end of the month onwards.” Wild pheasants are always skittish and there was no need for sewelling or other artifice to prompt them skywards. Within five minutes of the beat commencing, longtails were arrowing over the line, most to be killed neatly in front by Mike Lindsell, Simon Jamieson and Paddy Jago.
A quick pick-up and we were onto the main partridge drive set close to the remains of Creake Abbey. By now the breeze, a familiar friend in Norfolk, had freshened and Zoll “encouraged” us to stay alert and open
hostilities as far in front as was safe. This is the shoot’s wild grey showcase and we were soon transported back to the 1930s, when partridge manors were commonplace. Coveys of French and English cascaded down the slope throughout the line, the spaniel men 400yd behind us marking the fallen.
Up to this point, Zoll had been on edge. “No matter how many times you do the spring and autumn counts, and despite the fact you know the birds are there, it’s only when you actually see them go over the guns that you can relax,” he said.
realising a dream
For Zoll, greys in these numbers was the fruition of a dream he’d had after a conversation with the Earl of Leicester, when he’d been Viscount Coke. “I was a guest of Tom Coke’s many times at Burnham Thorpe – it was his personal beat – and knew it well,” said Zoll. “It was shot quite lightly and provided some great partridge and pheasant days. At that time, Thorpe was about 1,000 acres bigger – extending farther east to the park wall – and today the beat is just under 2,500 acres.
“Tom came to me at the end of the shooting season of 2010/11. He told me that Holkham was going to let some outlying beats and that Thorpe was one of them. I said I was very interested so formed a syndicate and took it on. While grey partridges were the main focus, I knew we had some very special pheasant drives, too, and I was sure that while we worked on the greys we’d have plenty of good days in the meantime with other traditional Norfolk quarry.
“Our first season was in 2011, when we had one small partridge day, which consisted of four drives and we shot 50 partridges, of which five brace were greys. Pheasant bags were small but mostly wild and it took quite a time before we broke three figures.
“With greys in mind, one of the hardest things to achieve initially was a farming approach to the land that allowed for as much agricultural diversity as possible. The land was and still is farmed by three tenant farmers and Holkham. When we arrived only Holkham and the largest tenant farm were in stewardship. One of the first things I did was commission a bird survey on the largest tenant Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) farm. The survey revealed a much greater diversity of species there and I took that report to the remaining two tenants and encouraged them to consider applying for stewardship schemes as contiguous blocks of farmland. They agreed and now all four farming interests are in conservation schemes.
“This resulted in a greater number of different plots and margins throughout the ground, presenting a much better patchwork of habitat, not only for adult overwintering but also for spring chick rearing. Our keeper, Nick Yarham, and I persuaded the farmers to approach their stewardship responsibilities to HLS differently. As examples, we stopped the practice of discing wild bird fallows in
the autumn, persuading them to do so in the spring, which meant that fallows were better overwintering habitat and vegetative regrowth in the spring was much faster with warmer soil.
“As a happy bonus to this change other ground-nesting birds, such as lapwings, did much better. Previously, the tenants cut their wildflower fallows at the end of the summer to prohibit excessive weed and bramble growth and this resulted in little or no cover through the winter. We now pay them to spray selectively those fallows off instead, which results in good, thick cover for greys through the winter.
“Four years ago I asked all the tenant farmers whether they would consent to us cultivating all the wild bird seed plots and Nick now ploughs and drills all those strips himself, with the exception of Holkham plots. This has enabled us to select much better mixes of crop that encourage good overwintering habitat and great spring chick production and rearing. These mixes are still consistent with HLS prescriptions but are much healthier, thicker and show more variety, particularly of flowering, insectbearing plants. I worked with agronomists to soil test each plot to see which plants would take best and for the past four years I’ve also worked with Tim Furbank from Oakbank to further refine our seed mixes. We now use mostly the Oakbank Autumn biannual Grey Partridge mix and its Bumblebird Mix, though each mix is site specific. By drilling each strip in two halves we always have one active strip for cover and chicks when the other half is ready to be re-drilled.
“The autumn count at Thorpe in 2011 – without us doing anything (since it was our first season) – was just shy of 350. That count followed the best spring in living memory, which also came on the back of a good year in 2010. The following year was a complete loss with torrential rain through the spring and early summer and the same happened in 2013. I watched several established partridge manors in Norfolk suffer and was determined that we weren’t going to go the same way.”
preventing decline
How to prevent that decline is the challenge for all those committed to sustaining the wild partridge. Britain’s sporting landscape was very different in the birds’ pre-1950s heyday. Farming was less intensive, weather patterns more reliable and avian and mammalian predators far less prevalent. The partridge manors that do survive are characterised by extremely game-friendly agricultural practices and intensive keepering on a scale that few can match. Yet even their success is subject to warm, dry conditions during the breeding season.
As Zoll and his syndicate could encourage good conservation farming practice but not control it, and Thorpe is patrolled daily by a wide range of raptor species, they decided to foster wild partridges under bantams, a method refined
and developed in the 1900s at Euston Hall. “And thank goodness we did,” said Zoll. “The summer of 2012 was the wettest in recent times – a disaster for wild greys – so that autumn I trapped two pairs of wild English near Choseley. We kept their offspring for overwintering in 2013, fostering their subsequent offspring to barren Thorpe pairs in the spring of 2014. We swap eggs with other shoots we know are doing the same as us and never keep birds for longer that one winter. We like to introduce other wild-strain genetics to our bloodlines, ensuring there’s not too much ‘line breeding’. All our overwintered pairs are penned in a quiet corner of the shoot, where we collect their eggs and hatch them under bantams. The partridge chicks then stay with their bantam mothers in coops and runs until old enough for 10ft x 10ft pens. As we identify barren pairs in the wild we release our bantam-reared coveys to them. They are surprisingly eager to adopt them. The wild parents then start teaching the chicks to survive and I can say that after a week or so it is impossible to tell a fostered brood from a wild-bred covey.
“Even in better wild-breeding years we continue to rear in this way and always foster the vast majority of our reared stock. By keeping them with bantam mothers and in family groups the birds are already part adapted to life outside a run, the bantams teaching them about raptors and other
predators and by keeping them in coveys they have a stronger family bond when fostered, sticking closely with their wild foster parents in compact coveys. Any birds we are unable to foster (mostly late-hatch chicks) are released in their family covey group and often join up with wild coveys, as long as release is carefully timed to ensure that wild bred and fostered coveys are well grown and not too territorial. We foster to pairs and single cock birds with equal success.
“We now have more than 400 grain hoppers out from early winter to late April and we think this helps anchor the greys better. Additionally, territories for pairs are more easily established if there are plenty of hoppers out. With about 350 acres of HLS and cover over our total of 2,500 acres we are able to site a lot of them close to that cover but nearly all are on existing hedges.
“We control foxes and all other ground vermin rigorously. Obviously, there’s nothing we can do about raptor presence or the weather but fostering certainly helps counteract natural predation and adverse climatic conditions in early summer if accompanied by suitable cover, habitat and supplementary feed in the winter.
“If you have no nascent stock on your ground then you have to start somewhere but try not to buy in game-farm birds, which can bring in disease or genetic impurity. However, if you already have a few wild birds and you’re fostering in the way we do, with habitat to accommodate the adults, it can be a very successful method.”
iconic quarry
Zoll believes that many love the idea of having wild greys on their land and would pursue it if they had a reasonable chance of success. And that for him is not a handful of pairs but the grey partridge as an iconic quarry species in sufficient quantities to feature regularly in the sporting calendar.
We had three further drives that day and witnessed strong coveys flowing over the stubbles and exploding over shelterbelts. It was testing shooting. The moment wild greys spot the guns they take evasive action, prompting the Earl of Leicester, who’s shot more of them than most, to suggest that we stand even closer to the cover in the future.
The last drive was in watermeadows bisected by the River Burn, a favourite patch for migrant woodcock after the November full moon. But now it was the English partridge that held the stage, cannoning over a small fold and leaving scant time for shooting in front. But many of the team were used to addressing late-season grouse breaking over short horizons and they provided ample work for the pickers-up.
Having gathered up my empties, I walked up to Gerwyn Jones, a man whose gamecard collection is a record of the exceptional. He was grinning widely. “Now that,” he said, “was one of the most exciting drives of my life. They’re just on you and over, swirling and curling, a world apart from reared redlegs.”
The pickers-up returned to the keeper’s house where the team awaited the final tally and the scooping of the sweepstake. It was won on 209: 77 greys, 110 redlegs, 13 pheasants and nine hares: an unforgettable experience on a Norfolk partridge manor. But need such days be so rare or could the fostering system transform other areas that were once bastions of the “little brown bird”?
Hampshire once rivalled Norfolk as the leading game county. On October 18, 1887 seven guns shot 1,344 partridges at The Grange, near Alresford. Today, it’s rightly famed for its opera house. But imagine a future when that estate and the county was again thronged with English partridges. Now that really would merit a standing ovation.