Sir Charles Forbes’ Edinglassie moor yielded 8081 birds in 1900.
Probably the record bag over dogs was the 10,600 grouse killed at Glenbuchat in 1872, where Mr. James W. Barclay (the owner) very kindly informs the author that driving was not started until after that year, whereas the greater number were killed by that plan at Delnadamph in 1872.]
THE LATEST METHODS OF PRESERVATION OF PARTRIDGES
At the present time there are in operation many more ways of preserving partridges than ever before. Indeed, the history of preserving these birds up to about 1860 could hardly be written for lack of material. For some strange reason, at the period when stubbles were cut long (and the author has shot in them a foot high as lately as 1870), and when partridges sat so close to the points of dogs that to all appearances they could have been easily exterminated, they nevertheless seemed to require no artificial assistance, and even no designed limitation of the reduction to the breeding stock. Perhaps it was that the close crouching of the birds in good covert was the natural method of assuring safety, and it may be that birds that could escape detection by the dogs could also escape it by the foxes and the vermin.
The wilder the game is, and the more it runs, the more scent it gives out to denote its presence to dogs; and with guns ahead, the birds that flush wild do not escape in driving, so that increase of wildness is not all in favour of the game even upon shooting days, and for the other 360 days of the year may possibly be against them, and in favour of the vermin that hunts by smell.
Whether this protection by the wits assists birds on their nests at all, and if so, as much as the loss of scent does, is too wide a question to enter upon here. It is only necessary to remark upon that subject that partridge preservation is to be divided, broadly speaking, into two systems: first, that which protects birds against foxes; second, that which is not called upon to add this heavy duty to the keeper’s ordinary business.
Roughly generalising, it is only in Norfolk and Suffolk where the keepers are not troubled with the fox question, and consequently it is only there that partridges can be safely left alone to find their own salvation. But this system can go too far even in those favoured counties, and naturally we find energetic shooters who try all round, declaring that Norfolk and Suffolk are “played out.” As a matter of fact, the very ease of preservation in those counties has done them a great deal of comparative injury, because, while they have been going back, or at least standing still, other counties have been going ahead in a wonderful manner. Probably the progress made in Nottinghamshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Cambridgeshire is far greater than anything done in the Eastern Counties, compared with what the respective stocks were in those districts twenty-five years ago.
The first phenomenal partridge preservation and the first break away from the system of letting birds preserve themselves occurred at Elvedon in the sixties of last century. Then large numbers of partridges were reared by hand on that estate, and at the same time, or a little later, a great many people began to rear partridges by hand. One of these was Lord Ducie, in Oxfordshire. The plan adopted there was to exchange pheasants’ eggs for those of partridges with anyone who would bring the latter; consequently, it may be said that Lord Ducie was one of the first men to prefer partridge shooting to covert shooting. Now, on the contrary, a very great many people set the partridge up as the first game bird, and his popularity is growing.
But to return to the hand rearing of partridges: the difficulty of this business is twofold. First, it is generally believed that the birds must be fed with ants’ eggs to make a success. Second, it is asserted that tame bred partridges “pack,” and that without old birds to lead them these packs are likely to travel for miles and be lost to those to whom they belong.
The first charge against hand rearing is not exactly true, because Lord Ducie’s keeper succeeded in rearing large quantities of partridges without the use of ants’ eggs. The author as a boy and in an amateurish way reared birds about the same period, but by the use of ants’ eggs, and consequently that experience does not go for much, because there is no difficulty in the task where plenty of these insects are to be found to feed the birds entirely for the first six weeks.