SOME OF Britain’s leading gamekeepers are looking to Ireland for help in saving one of their most-prized gamebird species from extinction.
Keepers from several of Britain’s largest wild grey partridge manors, including Queen Elizabeth’s Sandringham estate, yesterday visited a remote tract of bogland in Co Offaly.
Their mission was to see first-hand what is regarded by many as Ireland’s most successful bird conservation project.
The grey partridge scheme at the Boora parkland near Tullamore has single-handedly nursed the country’s fragile population of grey partridge back from the brink of extinction.
When first established by the National Parks and Wildlife Service in 2001, there were just 11 breeding pairs of this reclusive, ground-nesting bird left in the country; now the project boasts an autumn population of more than 900 birds.
British gamekeepers are keen to adopt the project’s captive-breeding programme, which is now considered an example of international best practice.
Each year, the project takes a certain number of breeding pairs temporarily into captivity, shielding them from inclement weather and predation to ensure the success of the breeding process and the strength of the overall population.
Service project manager Pádraig Comerford said staff at Boora welcomed the opportunity “to draw on the vast experience” of their British colleagues and to discuss practical management issues.
“The contrast between the estates which they manage and the cutaway bog landscape of Boora is vast,” he says, “but we share the goal of maximising the numbers of grey partridge on our respective lands.”
The grey partridge has a peculiarly short lifespan, averaging only 18 months, and spends just one minute of each day in the air.
The numbers of grey partridge – a mottled grey bird with a distinctive brick-red face – have been in decline across Europe in recent decades, primarily due to the impact of more intensive farming methods on its traditional farmland habitat.
The bird is seen by conservationists as a barometer by which to measure the health of the ecosystem, with several other bird populations following similar trajectories.
The British population has declined by more than 80 per cent in the past 25 years. The big estates in Britain want to harvest surplus numbers of the bird by using conservation techniques similar to those at Boora, so the birds can be hunted at a sustainable level.
In Ireland, the National Parks and Wildlife Service wants the Government to introduce measures that would compensate landowners for sowing cover crops on headlands to provide winter and nesting cover for the birds.
