Barbary partridge

Voice

Loud and far-carrying. The call is a shrill, grating ketch-ketch-ketch that climbs in pitch as it goes and can be heard for a mile down a quiet barranco. Also a short, hard chek when uneasy and soft clucking between birds of a covey. Most vocal from February to May, given from a rock ledge or a terrace wall.

Identification

Grey-looking gamebird with red bill and legs. Face, throat and cheeks blue-grey, crown and forehead chestnut, and below that a broad chestnut collar thickly spotted with white. Upperparts grey with a bluish bloom and a rusty tinge on the shoulder; flanks barred in blue-grey, chestnut, black and white. A pale rufous stripe runs back behind the eye. Flight low and direct, showing rusty tail sides.

Confusion species

Within the genus this one separates at a glance: the other three have a black-edged throat, Barbary has a chestnut, white-spotted collar around a blue-grey face under a chestnut crown. Red-legged Partridge has a white throat whose black surround breaks downwards into a broad field of black streaks and drops over neck and upper breast, with a warm chestnut crown and chestnut in the flank bars — the bird a British observer will actually be comparing it with, since Red-legs are everywhere at home. Rock Partridge has a pure white bib running further onto the upper breast, edged by an unbroken, knife-sharp black line, with black at the base of the bill and a blue-grey crown and nape, and broad, widely spaced flank bars. Chukar has a cream, not white, throat, a closed but slightly broader and more ragged black line, a grey-brown crown with a vinous cast, a rufous ear patch inside the black eye-stripe, and narrower, more numerous flank bars. Ranges touch at Gibraltar, where Barbary sits on the Rock and Red-legged holds the Spanish hinterland, and on Sardinia, where released Red-legs occur alongside it. Bear in mind too that releases in Spain and Italy have put Chukar × Red-legged hybrids into the field, with a creamy throat and a gorget only half broken into streaks.

Habitat

Dry, warm slopes with open low scrub: the cardón and tabaiba succulent scrub of the Canaries, macchia and garrigue on Sardinia, and the maquis on the flanks of the Rock of Gibraltar. Also steep barranco walls, terraces, the edges of small cultivated plots and open pine woodland. To at least two thousand metres on Tenerife.

Range and movements

Naturally a bird of North Africa from Morocco to Egypt, including Ceuta and Melilla. In Europe it breeds on Sardinia and on the Rock of Gibraltar; the Canary Island birds go back to stock released in the early nineteenth century and belong to the race A. b. koenigi. Birds have also been released on Madeira and in parts of Portugal. It is absent from mainland Iberia.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

The Barranco del Infierno above Adeje on Tenerife, or the upper Rock at Gibraltar, early in the morning. Follow the calls up the barranco and scan the terraces and walls; the birds feed in the shade of the tabaibas and step onto a wall in the first sun. On Sardinia work the inland stubbles and macchia instead.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, but the European populations are small and exposed. Gibraltar holds a few hundred birds on a couple of square kilometres, Sardinia a few thousand pairs, and on the Canaries the species faces hunting pressure alongside feral cats and rats. The annual topping-up with reared birds brings disease and genetic mixing with it.