THE GREY PARTRIDGE 135 



regularly looked forward to with keen anticipation by 

 thousands of eager gunners in England for many 

 decades of years. 



The grey partridge is essentially a fowl of the grain- 

 fields and cultivated lands. Land that is tilled with the 

 most scrupulous care, and which bears the heaviest crops 

 of grain, turnips, potatoes, and green food, may invari- 

 ably be relied upon to carry a greater number of 

 partridges than will pasture-land, or even ill-farmed 

 arable land carrying light and weed-choked crops. 

 Wherever the area of tillage is restricted, or land is 

 allowed to go out of cultivation, some diminution in the 

 number of partridges carried by that land assuredly 

 results. In fact, partridges persistently follow the culti- 

 vation of the soil, and this has been exemplified to a 

 remarkable degree in Russia of late years. In a recent 

 article in The Spectator it was related that in that 

 country the partridges have so steadily followed the 

 plough as cultivation has progressed from the south to 

 the furthest northern latitude at which rye and wheat 

 will grow, that they have almost taken a place in the list 

 of sub-arctic game-birds. 



Partridges withstand the vicissitudes of our climate, 

 the extreme variations between heat and cold, with 

 remarkable fortitude. They, however, thrive best in the 

 hottest and driest of our summers, and it is the in- 

 variable rule that the heaviest bags of these birds are 

 obtainable in those shooting seasons following dry 

 summers. More than a century and a half ago old 

 Gilbert White of Selborne quaintly remarked that 

 partridges were so exceedingly plentiful after the dry 

 summers of 1740 and 1741 that "unreasonable sports- 

 men killed twenty and sometimes thirty brace in a day." 



