to the ground. The far-flung isles of the Pacific and Indian Oceans were once well stocked with flightless feathered denizens, which included among their number some of the largest birds that ever lived.
Ireland has never quite had the dearth of scurrying, egg-thieving menaces to make true flightlessness feasible, though the closest we’ve come in living memory to a flightless land bird would almost certainly be the grey partridge. While their close cousins, the grouse, are typically birds of desolate mountain slopes, partridges are most at home in open fields. They are birds of grassland, of prairies, the rabbits of the bird world. Hunched over, they scuttle about the grass in family groups (coveys) preferring to scurry to safety in denser undergrowth whenever danger arises. Flight, that ancestral safety mechanism, is retained only as a final contingency, when the threat is too sudden or too fast to run away from. Then, the partridge take off on whirring wings over the fields. The partridge is sedentary. It has no need to cross oceans for the winter, so the only time it needs to divorce itself from the ground at all is when a predator cannot be hidden from or outrun.
The covey is at the centre of partridge life. Taking to open spaces leaves you more exposed to attack from the air or ground. So, the rules that obligate herding in deer and sheep dictate the same behaviour for the partridge. Plenty of eyes make short work of spotting incoming predators. But this strategy far from guarantees survival for the chicks, many of whom succumb to the usual malaises such as hunger and cold.
To help compensate for this, the mother partridge produces the largest clutch of any Irish bird: twenty-nine eggs is the record, a truly astounding reproductive feat. In a typical covey, the female will be joined by her mate, hatchlings and any of last year’s brood that have outlived their first winter. They may also generously open up their group to unrelated adults that have failed to breed, offering them the faint comfort of (greater) safety in numbers. Or perhaps there is just some peace to be had in silent company, foraging in the fields together. Now, in spring, the coveys start to fragment. Maturing partridges begin to coalesce into pairs; the males fan their tales, spread their wings and flash the dark horseshoe across their bellies in a bid to woo a mate. Now they are ready to form their own covey and splinter off from their natal flock.
The partridge chicks, like their counterparts among the mammals that graze the open planes, are precocial. They can walk and follow their mother around within an hour of hatching – and they need to. Not for them is the snug nest of a songbird, tucked away in a thicket, a schiltron of thorns to thwart the efforts of predators. Nesting on the ground, partridge chicks are exposed to all the threats that terrestrial living brings. They have to be mobile at once, or will surely get picked off.
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