Grey Partridges were part of my childhood where hedgerows and field edges had not been destroyed by the advance of intensive farming. The advantages sought have been costly to wildlife, but there are changes happening.
This partridge, like many similar species, is a beautiful bird with its colourful head and full grey chest. So why shoot them?
I have read the Guardian article for the saving of the species on the Duke of Norfolk’s large Sussex estate. With the advice of Dick Potts, now deceased, field margins were ‘re-invented’ to allow wild life to benefit by having a home and a food supply. Thus allowing a beautiful bird to survive and allowing the flowers that used to proliferate naturally to return, supply the pollen and insects for birds to feed upon. So much better to run your eyes to admire the colours of vegetation rather than the clinical plough furrow tight upon a field boundary.
So now we have a sustainable population of a species that is still ‘red-listed’, but in Sussex it is still safe. Well, some will not make through natural predation and chick survival rate, but a proportion will yield to the shotgun’s blast. Yes, the shooters will be allowed in to kill as long as they can pay. It won't be for the ‘common man’ but for the wealthy and the well connected. It would help to have an aristocratic background thus making an invite possible. Hmm… that's not just about conservation is it? Apparently that should provide one hundred thousand pounds to offset the loss in productivity.
I quote “Without shooting we wouldn't have saved them”. That's what money and power can do. To dictate how to conserve as long as the monied people can bang away at defenseless birds. Such fun! What a sport! What pleasure! I think that conservation needs money and the will to change a mindset of people who have the ‘right’ to own and use our land for their pleasure.
But let’s look at the positives here. Perceptions, habits, traditions and culture is changing. This is one example of it although the traditional right to hunt, shoot and fish is doing more than clinging on. We have a species benefitting from a better use of our land and which we know will help other wildlife too.
I am writing poems for a collection on matters effecting wildlife which is not about killing only, but about the ethic of land use.
I say ‘ A healthy planet is a human need’ and in a later line ‘Stricken the land and removed every weed’. I will blog the full poem later.
It seems that mankind has to interfere. It has to protect what it is striving to achieve by killing off the opposition. Okay, they do have a point in that crows, magpies, weasels, stoats and foxes will predate. Well, they have to eat, don't they? But it's okay because they are ‘dispatched at a distance’ and ‘it's not cruel anyway’. So killing is kind, then?
I know there are a mixture of points of view as to what we humans, as guardians of the planet, should do and this is one example. A mixture of wants satisfied by the outcome.
The Duke’s final quote in the article is ‘Shooting the bird here has done so much to preserve marks, he says “a lovely crescendo” to the year’. Noise to his ears will play a different tune in mine.
I will add the final stanza from my poem ‘Gunshot Echo’
We are guardians of our earth
Not to forestall but give our all
That gives every day a new birth
And not to hear the gunshot call
That's my views. Clear on that, I am.
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