It's a battlefield in fight to save last surviving partridge colony

THERE IS a war being fought on a remote patch of bogland in Co Offaly.

Armed with shotguns, rifles, traps and snares, Kieran Buckley and his team of conservation rangers spend their days patrolling a tract of the Boora Parkland near Tullamore.

Their task is to repel a seemingly endless army of foxes, grey crows, magpies, rats, stoats and mink.

At stake is Ireland’s last surviving colony of grey partridges.

The reclusive, ground-nesting bird is at the centre of a Europe-wide struggle to preserve the continent’s dwindling biodiversity.

Buckley, who helps run the Irish Grey Partridge Conservation Trust’s project at Boora, is employed to curtail almost anything that gets in the way of the birds and their delicate breeding patterns.

He admits his task is not a pleasant one, and not one conservationists like to advertise. However, he is convinced the bird’s fragile foothold in Ireland would have been lost without the “systematic control of predators”.

Because human settlement wiped out all the large predators in Ireland, there is an overabundance of middle-ranked predators on the food chain, which poses a major problem for ground-nesting birds.

Ireland’s native partridge population has been all but wiped out by the shift away from cereal farming, and the increased use of insecticides which kill the insect food they depend on to feed their young.

However, Buckley says ecologists have been “slow to appreciate” the profound role that predators play in the survival of the birds, especially when the population is confined to fewer and fewer habitats, or in this case one.

In 2001, there were just 22 birds left in the country (all based at Boora). Thanks to the work of the trust, the population has been nursed back from the brink and now numbers about 930.

The bird has a peculiarly short lifespan, averaging only 18 months, and spends just one minute of each day in the air.

The peak predator control time, a period Buckley jokingly calls “Defcon 1” is during April and May, when the hens incubate their eggs and the chicks hatch. The chief villains are foxes, which have been known to kill as many as eight hens in a single visit.

Buckley goes to extreme lengths to protect his charges, even getting up in the middle of the night to hunt down marauding foxes.

The next most prolific predator is the grey crow, which has a particular penchant for partridge eggs. The crows sit in nearby trees tracking the movements of the hens to try and locate the eggs.

At the outset of the project, Buckley and his team noticed a curious phenomenon. The nests closest to where they worked were those most frequently predated.

He believes the crows were using humans to locate the nests, a process known as “observer initiated predation”. In Europe, the partridge is increasingly seen as a “barometer bird” by which to measure the overall health of the ecosystem. Creating the right habitat for the birds goes hand in hand with protecting a range of other species, including barn owls, finches and hares.

In Britain, where the bird is still widely hunted, it has, paradoxically, fared much better because of well-managed wild partridge manors.

Securing the core Irish population at Boora is only the first step, Buckley says. “The next phase is changing agricultural policy.”

The longer-term goal of the project is to bring the bird out of isolation in Boora and back into their traditional farmland home.

The trust recently established a demonstration farm in north Dublin to convince policymakers that more ecologically sensitive farming can co-exist with modern food production.

Some 70 partridges from Boora have been relocated there, where they live on specially designated four-metre long conservation strips, dotted throughout the farm. The idea is to have the best of both worlds “biodiversity and food”, he says.

Patridge Family: Population was just 22 in 2001

The compact gamebird with distinctive orange face lives for just 18 months and flies for an average of only one minute a day. Formerly found in every county, numbers have been depleted by the decline in cereal farming. The use of pesticides and herbicides has also reduced the insect food the birds depend on to feed their young.

Ireland’s population fell to just 22 birds in 2001 (all located at Boora Parkland) but a conservation project has now seen their number recover to 930.