Red-legged

Day 278 #365DaysWild

Who doesn’t like visitors?

We’re enjoying breakfast and coffee. 

Turning it over.

Usual wrestling with the calendar.

And uninvited guests arrive - a pair of red-legged partridge. Nosey. Looking through the lounge windows. Prettily-patterned charmers.

Our native partridge is the grey partridge - another farm bird in calamitous decline.

Our red-legged visitors are prospecting around the garden as their kind always does in spring.

Part of the annual, unregulated release of millions of game birds by landowners for shooting. Not native. Sometimes termed ‘French partridge’. First released for ‘sport’ by King Charles II. Perhaps, with his local connections he had them released in Bestwood? He and Nell Gwynn.

We offer safe harbour for wildlife here. Less so royals.

The birds will struggle to find a place where fox, carrion crow, tawny owl or stoat can’t find their eggs and young.