The perfect dog for partridges

For wild greys and redlegs, you need a worker that’s keen, thorough and won’t mind the brambles. So which to go for?

- ALEC MARSH

As every self-respecting reader of The Field knows, a dog is not for Christmas. Rather, it is for retrieving, pointing or flushing out game. At the very minimum, it should be able to keep us company while out on a stroll or sheltering from the heavens in the elderly, short-wheelbase Land Rover.

As the first of this season’s partridges appear on the sportsman’s horizon, there is a pressing question that needs to be answered: which dog? Which is the gundog of choice, the one that leaves all others panting in shade when Perdix perdix – or, indeed, Alectoris rufa – hove into view?

To find out, I turn my address book to its final page and pick up the phone to Nick Zoll, founder and manager of a syndicate operating a 2,500-acre shoot on the Holkham Estate at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, celebrated for its pre-eminence in wild English partridges. If Zoll doesn’t know the right dog for the partridge, no one will.

He begins by noting that if one were walking-up partridges over green stubbles in September, as they did in the days before driven game, then a pointer would be the dog of choice. But given that north of 99% of all partridges today are shot in drives, the pointer is superfluous.

“For me, shooting partridges coming over a hedge, actually the ideal dog for that is a spaniel, either a springer or a cocker, with a cocker having a slight edge only in as much as they tend to be incredibly thorough workers of the ground,” says Zoll. “They’ve got a nose that’s glued to it, more so than a springer, so they don’t miss much. And if you have to send one into a hedge to pick up a bird, it’ll do it with ease. It’ll go under any bramble or thorn that most dogs, including springers, are less inclined to want to do. And they’re just built for it.”