Shooting and fishing: Quite a few who booked for grouse have been told ‘sorry pal, grouse are off’

When Bell Ingram sent me a jolly press release announcing that Scotland is experiencing a partridge boom, I rather foolishly assumed that we were enjoying an upsurge in numbers of wild grey partridge, a bird which has been sadly missing from these parts in recent years (predatory buzzards, I’ll be bound).

I should have known better. What we are experiencing is a boom in demand for driven red leg partridges, which is not quite the same thing.

The main difference between red legs and greys is that instead of zooming across stubble at head height in large coveys, the red leg zoom in ones and twos at a stratospheric height, off hills as a rule. And they can be successfully reared like pheasants in any number before being released into the wild.

They were brought north to Moray 25 years or so ago to see if they would work on the lower edges of the Cawdor grouse moors, so that if there were no grouse there would at least be something to shoot to fill the estate coffers. And it all worked astonishingly well.

Which is what Bell Ingram is trying to tell us. Although some grouse moors have done phenomenally well this year – notably the Angus glens and the Lammermuirs (I thought they bred only windmills in the Lammermuirs these days), grouse are the curate’s egg of game shooting – only good in parts. So quite a few who booked for grouse have been told, “sorry pal, grouse are off”. Hence a surge in demand for driven red legs.

For those of us who cannot bear the thought of being unable to kill something 365 days of the year, I should point out that while grouse will set you back £130 to £150 a brace, you’ll get away with a measly £50 to £70 a brace for partridges.

Anyway, Bell Ingram would have us believe there are queues of what they call “hunters” clamouring for partridge shooting and I don’t necessarily disbelieve them.

I have a relatively high success with red legs because as my friend Jo (“The Expert”) has pointed out, they may be small but they fly quite slowly, “or else how would you manage to hit them?”

They don’t look slow to me. He’s bloody rude, Jo. But probably right. A great lumbering pheasant travels a lot faster than you think so I don’t do so well with those.

Anyway, Bell Ingram has some super dooper estate or other lined up near Dunkeld positively brimming with red legs, so if you fancy a pop give them a ring. Though if there is such a clamour, I suppose it may be too late by now. Gosh, life is complicated.