Bringing partridges back from the brink

Another Life: The scamper of a gaudy cock pheasant from ditch to ditch in front of the car the other morning gave its usual surreal delight.

However many centuries these Chinese migrants have been made to feel at home in Ireland (two-and-a-bit, in fact), their iridescent presence in the shaggy far west can seem incorrigibly alien. But one must still thank the local gun club for the odd flash of silk and brocade among the ryegrass and rushes.

Among our greatly diminished stock of native Irish game birds, one in particular has faded so far from popular knowledge that few people can picture where it once used to live. Notwithstanding the Christmas carol, pear trees were never the home of Perdix perdix, the grey partridge, a ground-feeding, ground-nesting, ground-roosting, largely sedentary bird.

It flourished in the Ireland of hayfields and tillage: of many little fields of potatoes, turnips, flax and grain. Its numbers fell when the countryside emptied after the Famine, rose when Dev promoted wheat in the 1930s, fell again when agriculture went intensive and left no ground-cover in spring or seeds from stubbles and weeds in winter. When, 10 years ago, the wild bird was taken off the Irish hunting list, the gesture was entirely academic: gun clubs had already adopted a voluntary ban on shooting what was once one of their main quarry species.

At that time, the native breeding population was down to fewer than 200 pairs and fast declining towards total extinction. By the autumn of 2002, there were fewer than 50 wild partridge in Ireland, all living on a single "island" of scrubby cutaway Bord na Móna bog at Boora, Co Offaly.

Here, from the early 1990s, they became the obsession of Dr Brendan Kavanagh of the Royal College of Surgeons. His studies led to a project to restore and spread the species.

This month, for example, 21 wild grey partridge were trapped in Estonia (where the villagers, far from shooting them, throw them handfuls of oats in winter) and brought back to Boora by Kieran Buckley, the project's conservation officer. Like an earlier batch of wild birds brought in from France, their DNA has been checked for genetic compatibility with the Irish species. Some will be paired naturally with the native birds in a captive breeding programme; others released into the local population, there to invigorate their coveys without swamping the native genes.

Last autumn, the Boora partridges had reached 140 birds, up by half on the previous year. At least 18 pairs had bred - but 25 pairs are needed for a viable population in the wild. As new captive pairs mate and have chicks (all shielded from sight of people), the families are released into a terrain utterly transformed from the scanty vegetation of a decade ago. With funding from the National Parks and Wildlife Service and others, the project sows long strips of linseed, kale, oats, stubble turnip, forage rape, lucerne and triticale (a hybrid cereal), along with native wild grasses and wildflowers. The lush growth provides nesting cover, winter seeds, and abundant summer insects for the young. Raised banks give their parents a good look-out for predators; nearby "beetle banks" offer take-away food.

Around the core 150 hectares leased from Bord na Mona, co-operative farmers have delayed or changed their mowing to encourage partridges on to their land. Others are sowing small cereal plots in a new option in the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. Even Coillte is helping, by opening up corridors through blocks of conifers to help the birds disperse on to farmland. Gun clubs in Kildare, Wicklow, North Tipperary and Cork are waiting to start their own projects with coveys of partridges from Boora's captive breeding, or with birds imported from the same French sources. They are willing, it seems, to spend years on habitat improvement and building up numbers without a thought of ever aiming a gun.

At Boora, wild nature's own predators are given no quarter. The necessity of systematic shooting and trapping of foxes, stoats, mink, rats, feral cats, grey crows, magpies, rooks and jackdaws is stressed in the project's annual report to the NPWS (last year, 36 foxes, 25 stoats, 100-plus grey crows, and so on). Such generalist predators thrive, it argues, in landscapes humans have changed, while endangered species struggle to survive. "Uncontrolled predators," it concludes, "would eventually become the final arbiters of endangered species."

A timeless painting by Thorburn shows a covey of grouse sleeping by moonlight in an autumn stubble field. They lie in a little circle, facing outwards, so that if intruded upon, they could whir away in all directions without colliding in the air. Such evolutionary ingenuity deserves its second chance in Ireland, however long the shooters have to wait.