Patridge Shoot

[Holland 0]

Hi there,

 

I would like to pick the brains of any experienced keepers on the subject of running a partridge shoot.

 

I have a small piece of land in Kent (300 acres) which I would like to turn into a little partridge shoot for a few friends.

 

The land is fairly flat arable and grass land leading down to a brook.

 

There is no established woodland, but some newly planted strips of oak, birch, and beech (about 10' tall) and many mature thick but low hedge rows.

 

I have been, and still am involved in keepering on Pheasant shoots but have very limited knowledge when it comes to Partridge.

 

The reason I think my relatively baron bit of land will lend it's self well, is the fact that there are scores of redlegs already on it!!!

 

I have a contract farmer, but would like to know what covercrops to use, where to put them, how many birds to buy and when to release them?????

 

Any help please!

[borntoshoot 1]

i am not the most experienced, far from it but every shoot i have been to (beating) has used maize as cover crop, and partridge like to roam onto ploughings and stubbles aswell as cover crop, whatever you do , do not plant canary grass because it gets so thick the birds cannot get in or out of it, it is also horrible for beaters and dogs to work their way through as it is so thick and drops seeds everywhere when you walk through it, we have it in our cover crops (self seeded we think)

[georgehare 0]

I used to work on a fairly big partridge shoot down south before i moved on the grouse.

We used a mixture of millet, dwarf sorghum and linseed in our cover crops, the linseed and millet provided little cover but lots of food/seeds and the sorghum was the opposite, so together they worked well! The reason we used three different things in the mix is because we could put this down as 'wild bird cover' on certain schemes (the entry level scheme i think) and had it either paid for or got a good lot of money put towards it! Depending on who owns the land/has the farming on it, i would definately look into singing up on these schemes because it will lower your costs alot! Although i dont think you will be allowed to erect pens/release birds in the cover so we used to get round this by releasing the birds in the wheat and barley next to the cover.

 

Without seeing the ground its hard to say where to put your cover crops but if you plan or driving the partridge then it would be advisable to have a hedge or similar to drive them over else they are likely to just skim the floor!

Putting the cover crops along side the young trees will be advisable because it just provides more vary in cover and food and is more likely to hold your partridge.

 

Numbers will be entierly up to you, depending on how many you want to shoot and how much money you want to spend. Unless you have the time to put in dogging/flagging the birds back in, vermin control etc then dont expect high returns (over 35-40%) but as long as you keep plenty of food and water about, and keep fox and public numbers to a minimum then they are generally easier to keep than pheasants.

 

We used to release our partridge in two batches at the start and mid july. this is quite early but we had to release early so the birds were fit, flying well and ready to shoot in september. although if you dont plan to shoot the birds until later you can obviously release them later. When we felt the birds were ready to be let out (usually after a couple of weeks) we would let about 50 birds out each day until the pens were empty. Due to needing to get the pens moved and taken down we never done this but most keepers keep a few (10-30) birds in the pen for a good few weeks after the main bulk of the birds have been released to act as callers, to keep the others close by.

 

My advice would be start small and see how it goes. Small cover crops and a few small release pens rather than a couple of big cover crops and one pen.

 

Hope that makes sense GH