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Making it count - Grey Partridge Trophy winners announced

As an incentive to encourage more people to get involved in partridge conservation, every year the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) awards a series of regional Grey Partridge Trophies. These partridge trophies are presented to the farm or estate that has contributed the most to the c...

Don't forget to do your autumn counts for the Partridge Count Scheme

This week, several GWCT research staff are out in the Sussex countryside undertaking autumn partridge counts. Autumn counts provide a great insight into the breeding success of partridge pairs and, in turn, the health of farmland biodiversity. People on farms and estates across the country are ta...

Balgonie shortlisted for RSPB Nature of Scotland Awards

The RSPB Scotland has nominated the GWCT’s Balgonie Biodiversity Project for the 2023 Nature of Scotland Awards. It is one of four projects shortlisted in the Food and Farming category for its excellent work at the arable demonstration farm near Glenrothes in eastern Scotland. The 500ha site prod...

BBC Landward goes grey partridge counting at Balgonie with the GWCT

Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust Scotland’s Fiona Torrance recently took Dougie Vipond from BBC Landward on a grey partridge count around the fields of Balgonie, where conservation efforts have seen numbers of this iconic farmland bird soar in the last 10 years. The grey partridge was once...

Wild Partridge ‘keeper retires after 35 years with GWCT

Since the 1980s the GWCT has developed and run four highly successful and influential lowland wild game recovery demonstration projects. Integral to all these projects was the gamekeeping programme which was run by Malcolm Brockless. The first was on Salisbury Plain in the 1980s where we demonstr...

Green Thumbs At GWCT HQ: Growing Oakbank’s Advanced PARTRIDGE Wildflower Mix

Written by Beth Brown, PARTRIDGE placement student The Advanced PARTRIDGE Wildflower Mix is a wild bird seed mix (AB9), and undoubtedly one of the best habitat options to support farmland wildlife. It has been developed by scientists at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) throughout t...

Essential reading for anyone interested in farming and nature conservation. A review of The Return of the Grey Partridge

Written by Roger Draycott, Director of Advisory Services & Education Return of the Grey Partridge is available from www.gwctshop.org.uk for £20 In recent years there has been a plethora of books about nature conservation in Britain and the biodiversity crisis in which we find ourselves. Some...

Can we really get grey partridge thriving again in Wales having lost so much of our mixed farming?

The bird which GWCT is probably most associated with is the Grey partridge yet in Wales we have very few left.  After the loss of much of our mixed farming in the 1980’s when it became cheaper to buy our concentrates onto the farm rather than doing battle with combining crops on marginal land, i...

A Good Quality Redleg

By Mike Swan, GWCT Head of Education Once upon a time there was a bird called an Ogridge. It was the invention of the now long gone Ormsby Game Services, of Louth in Lincolnshire. A hybrid between a redleg cock and a chukar hen, it was proclaimed as the partridge of the future. These two species ...

The Peppering Partridge Project - research in practice