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Gray partridge
Perdix perdix | Patrijs | Perdiz pardilla
The Grey Partridge is the bird of the old-fashioned field: a round grey-brown gamebird that would rather run than fly. Where the rusty creak of a pair still sounds at dusk, the farmland has not yet been emptied.
Voice
The call is a hoarse, rusty kierr-ik, like an old gate swinging open, usually given at dusk from a track or field edge. On flushing the birds break into a hurried rick-rick-rick. Most vocal between February and April, when pairs stake out their ground.
Recording: Jochem Verweij — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Compact gamebird with an orange-brown face, grey neck and breast and finely vermiculated warm brown flanks. Most birds carry a dark chestnut horseshoe on the belly, larger and fuller in the male. In flight the rusty tail sides stand out, together with the fast, low, whirring wingbeats that skim the clods.
Confusion species
In the Netherlands there is little else, but in southern Europe and around release sites the Red-legged Partridge comes in; it has a white face framed in black, a red bill and sharp black flank bars. Juvenile Grey Partridges are plain sandy and streaked and then look very like a large Quail.
Habitat
Small-scale open arable land with plenty of edges: rough ditch banks, hedges, beetle banks, stubbles and fallow strips. Nests in dense rank vegetation along field margins. For their first weeks the chicks depend entirely on insects, and therefore on unsprayed, weedy field edges.
Range and movements
From Ireland east to western Siberia, densest in central and eastern Europe. In the Netherlands it is scattered through the arable districts of Groningen, Flevoland, Zeeland and Limburg. In Spain it is confined to the north, where its own race lives in high grassland and broom in the Cantabrians and the Pyrenees.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- Migration direction
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Work the edges of arable country at sunset in March, driving slowly along farm tracks; calling pairs then stand out on bare ground or stubble. Scan the margins with binoculars: the orange face lights up in low sun while the body vanishes against the clods.
Conservation status
In the Netherlands the species has crashed since the 1960s and remains a Red List bird still in free fall, and the picture is the same across most of western Europe. Field enlargement, the loss of weedy margins and their seeds, insect decline, early cutting and heavy predation in a bare landscape all pull the same way.