DRIVEN
SHOOTING

CLASSIC SPANISH PARTRIDGE AT
PINOS ALTOS & LAS GOLONDRINAS

I first shot Spain nearly 35 years ago. I was a sophomore at McGill, not yet twenty, when I traveled to Madrid for winter break. The Madrid Ritz was very different then. Very underused. Very proper. One would not dream of going to the lobby in less than a blue blazer and tie. I suppose it was off-season but rooms were only $12.00 and suites with separate sitting rooms were eighteen bucks. (This was before the hyperinflation of the nineteen seventies.) Multitudes of uniformed staff attended to ones every need. Only the finest linens were used and if one left ones room for even fifteen minutes beds would be remade and shoes re-polished.

However I had come for the pigeon shooting at Somontes, the great club, indeed Mecca, within Madrid.  And it was spectacular shooting especially with the specifically bred zurito - the pigeon that is all wings, a small body and flies like a rocket.

The famous restaurants of the day - Horchers and The Jockey Club were fabulous as well.  I arrived at the Jockey at 10PM, thinking I was pretty cool, in the way that a nineteen year old would on his first trip abroad, only to be told by the captain that I was most welcome to have a drink at the bar but that dinner was not served for another hour.  Great red-legged partridge shooting was available near Madrid, all wild birds, and again the cost was not a significant factor.

In the early nineteen eighties, I shot stag & deer with Juan Antonio Conde and Ricardo Medem at Cazatur’s El Castano not too far from Toledo.  I shot partridge at a great wild bird shoot in the west of Spain, Extremadura, based at the town of Trujillo, an ancient walled city.  Within these walls stood a great palace restored and refurbished, if memory serves by a member of the Whitney clan.  It was here that Fernando Saiz, “Nano”, and Fernando Bustamante, then partners, housed their clients and guests. The accommodation was great, the food and wine spectacular, and the sport even better.

They were then, and are now, both elegant gentlemen and sportsmen of the first order.  A handshake was as good as a contract.  Their partridge were totally wild. Certainly small groups of birds did come over, but primarily it was coveys, true family groups. But times have changed and the massive predator controls that used to be acceptable , including strong indiscriminate poisoning which enabled the commercial shooting of wild birds, has been banned. Reared partridge, if released properly when they are young, fly exceptionally well and prove a significant test for the skill of most guns. (I am not extolling the virtues of late releases, or crated birds, both of which practices occur and are deplorable.) The better shoots are a combination of wild and reared perdiz.

The various operators use different methods of releasing partridge. Some, including Nano Saiz, release the birds when they are very, very young. They are placed in large pens to protect them from predators. As soon as they are capable of flying they are released. A number of estates, including some of the very good ones, release partridge that are a bit older. These tend to be released from small holding pens where they are kept for a few days to settle in. A percentage of the group is released thereafter each day and after a week all the birds are in the wild. The idea here is that the birds in the pen act as callbacks and keep the freshly released birds in the area while they find food and water. Some operators put out hoppers to feed the birds, while others primarily spin lines of wheat that are cast from four wheel drives or quad bikes. The only real problem associated with released birds, be it partridge in Spain or pheasant in the British Isles or on the Continent are the operators who continue to put out birds throughout the season. These “topped up” birds, often shot before they have had time enough to harden to the elements, prove less than testing targets. This is neither fair to the bird or the shooter. The best shoots release all birds close to the same time, months before shooting begins.