Day 54 - The First Day of Nature

On the first Day of Nature my true love gave to me, a Partridge on a board walk.

Hi all today's Day 54 also known as Christmas Day. There is a famous but long Christmas carol that you may of heard of called The 12 Days of Christmas. I have decided to do my take on it and do The 12 Days of Nature. The first line of this song goes 'On the first Day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree'. My take goes, as you will be able to see at the top, 'on the First Day of Nature my true love gave to me, a partridge on a board walk'. The reason I chose this is because I have a beautiful picture of one that I took at an RSPB reserve called Fairburn Ings. (though i cant find it right now! Will post it when I do :-)

Anyway, I think it's about time to get on with the facts so here they are:

• Partridges are game birds. They get hunted by people and then they eat them. I personally prefer mine flying around fields happily instead of on my plate, I hope you do too.

•  Adding to this I found something I found an indicator to just how many people hunt and eat these birds. While I was researching them I typed in 'partridge' into Google. The top search result that came up was partridge but the second most searched thing that included the word partridge was partridge recipes. The amount of people that must have searched that for it to come up as the second most searched thing is incredible. 

• Partridges are strictly ground birds and despite the line from the song they are never likely to be found in pear trees.

•  Despite being a ground bird. partridges still fly and the way the fly is different to your common garden bird. They fly with 'whirring' wings with the odd glide thrown in here or there. 

• They are a Red Status bird as they have suffered extremely severe declines. Also they only have 43,000 breeding territories across the UK.

• They are 30cm long with a 46cm wingspan. Also both male and female birds weigh 390g.

Sorry there isn't loads of information here but seeing as today's Christmas, I didn't want to do loads.

 Anyway here are some links to more information:

RSPB - Grey Partridge

BTO - Grey Partridge

BBC Nature - Grey Partridge

Hope you enjoyed,

Z.