Wild Partridge £600 a brace

[scolopax]

I saw this price quoted in an off topic thread. At first it seems a crazy amount, but then i think of the expense required to produce a shootable surplus of wild Greys?  Gamekeeper(s) wages, housing, vehicles, insurances, misc costs, game strips / brood rearing cover etc etc. A fair chunk of money to spend with no guarantee to get any return, for some seasons there would be no shooting at all but still all the expense, for after all the habitat improvement and pest control the little birds are at the mercy of the weather in June. I know a large estate in the south of England had a mission to bring back the Greys like they had historically, and they succeeded but not without effort, a large keepering team and a lot of agricultural ground taken out of production.

I would imagine a very similar model to grouse shooting, except instead of recouping costs with season bags of many 100's if not 1000's of brace of grouse I would expect any wild Grey partridge shoot would barely shoot a fraction of that. A days bag? 30 -50 brace maybe on an exceptional good breeding season ? maybe only do that a couple of times a season, certainly not multiple times a week like commercials. So I could see full well where £600 a brace can come from. 

[dogone]

    I have a shoot in western Canada. This fall I will have overs 1000 grays on my land. They are everywhere. I take a lot but not at 900 a pair. 
    They were introduced a 100 years  ago and have done really well. Our native grouse used to be seen in flocks of hundreds. Habitat loss has really hurt them.