The Case of the Disappearing Partridges

The Case of the Disappearing Partridges

 One of the reasons I started this blog is to write about the birds that make the North Okanagan a special place. Today I would like to explain the present status of the Gray Partridge. Back in the 1980s the North Okanagan was THE place to find this species. Sad to say for the provincial lister, this is no longer the situation.

The Gray Partridge is not native to North America. It’s an Old World species with a widespread distribution in Europe and Asia. However people have been introducing the species to various parts of North America since the late 18^th Century! All told, Gray Partridges have been let loose in over 30 states and provinces. Populations have done particularly well in the prairie provinces and states, while in many other locations the introductions failed, some within a couple of years as an introduction did at Vanderhoof (1931-1933), and some after a few decades like the populations introduced around Southern Vancouver Island (introduced first in 1908 and the last bird recorded in 1972).

In B.C.’s Okanagan Valley Gray Partridges first appeared in the winter of 1916/17 when a one collided with a powerline at Summerland. Presumably the southern interior birds were not introduced but expanded from populations originally introduced to north-central Washington State between 1913 and 1917. By 1925 Grays had reached Salmon Arm and J.A. Munro, an ornithologist of the day, speculated that by the mid-1930s the Gray Partridge would become very numerous and “outnumber all the species of upland game birds combined” (The European Gray Partridge in the Okanagan valley, British Columbia. Canadian Field-Naturalist 29:163-164 cited in The Birds of British Columbia, Volume Two Diurnal Birds of Prey through Woodpeckers (1990) Royal British Columbia Museum.) Mr. Munro was counting his partridges before they had hatched, because in 1926 (according to The Birds of B.C.) or 1927 (The Birds of the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. 1987. Royal British Columbia Museum) the Okanagan population crashed and never recovered its former abundance.

By the 1980s Gray Partridges were, according to Robert, Richard and Syd Cannings’ The Birds of the Okanagan Valley “far more common in the North Okanagan… than in the more cramped southern region” perhaps because the species favours open country. There were more irrigated hay, alfalfa and grain fields, sagebrush areas, and orchards in the north than in the south.

Around Vernon in the 1980s there were a few spots favoured by birders where Gray Partridges were not too hard to find.   These included the alfalfa fields along Mission Road near its junction with the road that goes to the weather station (now home of the Allan Brooks Nature Centre), fields along Head of the Lake Road including Open areas around the gated housing development, Desert Cove Estates, and the grasslands around Goose Lake.  Given a few hours search a birder in the know could usually count of finding a pair (early spring) or a covey (most of the rest of the year) in one of these locations.

By the time I moved to Vernon (1989) Gray Partridges had become scarce. Finding a covey made for a red-letter day, as people used to say. Unfortunately the birding community still clung to the perceived wisdom that Vernon was the place to add this species to one’s list. Birders from Vancouver and Victoria always seemed to want the wretched bird and as a supposed local “expert” I could only rarely produce a sighting. By the late 1990s the situation became worse, as fewer and fewer birds were found by anyone. During the first decade of the twenty-first century a few birds were seen around Desert Cove Estates a few times, but by about 2007 or 2008 even these stragglers had disappeared. Therefore it’s not surprising that in 2010 as a compiler of the local checklist I declared the Gray Partridge extirpated in the North Okanagan. Dumb move.

On 17 December, 2012 my buddy, Gary Davidson, and I were trying to cover our part of the Vernon Commonage for Vernon’s Christmas count. As was our habit which had evolved over the decade and a half we had been given the area, I drove Gary to Kekuli Provincial Park, at the south end of Highridge Road south of town, to drop him off so that he could walk along the railway tracks all the way to the north end of Kalamalka Lake where I would pick him up. His route was productive. He always added a few species to our list, usually Barrow’s Goldneyes, a grebe or two, maybe a White-throated Sparrow or a Spotted Towhee in the brushy gullies that cut through the grasslands and rocky cliffs. That afternoon about halfway through his megawalk three small plump partridge-like birds flushed in front of him and flew almost directly away from him. He saw gray upper wings, backs and tail centres with rufous outer tail feathers. The bird disappeared but flushed once again, this time from partway up a cliff. Again he saw the birds from behind only.

When I picked him up an hour or so later, his first question was, “Are there Gray Partridges in the Kekuli area?”

I would like to think I was being overly-honest when instead of saying, “I don’t know,” I replied, “Well, there are records of Chukar from Vernon, so maybe your birds were Chukars.” A look into the Sibley app. on my iPhone showed that from behind one couldn’t really tell which species, Gray Partridge or Chukar, one was looking at.

Naturally such an answer didn’t do a thing to enhance Gary’s day. Eventually I admitted that there had been only ONE Chukar record, way back in the early 1990s, possibly of a bird that escaped retrieving dog trails, and that the record had come from Middleton Mountain which is across the lake and far to the north of Kekuli. Chances are Gary’s three birds were Gray Partridges. The case for Gray Partridge got stronger when in response to my email query, Gwenneth Wilson of Kelowna reported seeing Gray Partridges twice in Kekuli in 2009.

All this just goes to show you that Gray Partridges can make anyone, J.A. Munro or me, look pretty silly when we dare to declare that we actually know where the coveys are headed, whether it be toward super abundance or toward extirpation. The truth, as the X Files maintained, is out there. But sometimes the predictors, like Munro and me, are somewhere else.