The Duke of Norfolk: The precious gift Prince Philip gave me to restore my estate’s wildlife

There is a riveting account in the 18th Duke of Norfolk’s new book of his late father’s valour in the Second World War, both at Dunkirk and later in the push through Italy, for which he was awarded a Military Cross.

Neither a military history book nor an account of his aristocratic family, however, the book describes the 20-year project he undertook at his home at Peppering Farm, on the Arundel estate in West Sussex, to save the grey partridge from extinction across the South Downs National Park.

The Duke’s description of his father’s courage, he explains, is to illustrate that while previous generations have had enormous difficulties to overcome, ours are just as crucial – namely reversing nature’s decline.

The Duke – Edward Fitzalan-Howard, known as Eddie Norfolk – contends that while climate change is critical, and is being addressed at a cost of billions, it is the dwindling of natural species and habitats that will kill off mankind long before global warming does. So he has, to use the military vernacular, signed up to help save it.

At the estate office in Arundel, overlooked by 11th-century Arundel Castle, which has been the seat of his family for more than 850 years, the Duke bears no sign of stress or fatigue from organising the two biggest state events in recent history.

As Earl Marshal – a hereditary role – he planned Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral and the Coronation of King Charles. He is, as one might imagine, the height of discretion – both on what went on behind the scenes at these pivotal occasions and on the matter of the King’s health, which at the time of writing is dominating front pages.

What he does say is that there are parallels between those huge events and his passion project over the past two decades to restore the wild grey partridge to the South Downs. ‘Yes, there are similarities. For the funeral, I had a wonderful team of 100 people involved in the planning, while the Peppering project only has 20, but both have required a huge attention to detail to make things happen. The detailed work was done by people other than me, but I was ultimately responsible for delivery.’

In 2002, the year he inherited the title from his father, the Duke recalls that Dick Potts, a renowned ecologist who had been studying the grey partridge on the South Downs since the 1960s, walked into his office and announced: ‘Eddie, unless you do something, the grey partridge will become extinct locally within five years.’ The Duke replied: ‘Dick, that’s not going to happen on my watch.’

Potts explained that there were only three pairs left at Peppering and, moreover, this wasn’t about the loss of just one species but the crumbling of an entire ecosystem. There’s an old country saying, according to the Duke: ‘The grey partridge is a sign of the health of the countryside. If we have them around, all is well; if we lose them, we do so at our peril.’

The Duke says that he felt it was a summons. ‘When I was 12, I would spend two weeks in September at my grandparents’ house, Carlton Towers in Yorkshire, before going back to school. A group of us cousins would walk up the wild greys,’ he says, reminiscing about his early shooting experiences.

‘We’d be lucky to get two a day each, but it developed my interest in nature, seeing the greys, along with the lapwings, corn buntings and other wildlife, and it gave me a great insight into the natural world.

‘This was a call to help a bird I had grown up with, learnt a great deal about and had an affinity with. Without realising it, I had been waiting for this moment all my life. I knew I could help.’

The Duke’s admiration for the grey partridge, he readily admits, coexists with a passion for a day’s shooting, but only when there is a surplus. ‘We work 364 days of the year giving to nature to perhaps have one day’s shooting when we harvest the surplus. You have to have a passion far beyond shooting.’

The shoots are also a source of income and help the estate to persevere with environmental projects and its biodiversity recovery programme.

Through intensive fieldwork, Dick Potts and his colleagues identified three reasons for the partridge’s local decline. The growing use of herbicides and pesticides was reducing the abundance of wildflowers and the insects on which chicks feed, leading to lower survival rates; more intensive farming and the consequent reduction in habitat meant there were fewer places to nest; and, as partridge numbers fell, the relative effects of predation increased.

This was pioneering work, and developed into what became known as the GWCT (Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust) Sussex Study – now the longest-established survey of farmland ecosystems in Europe. It was the first time ecologists had looked closely at the man-made habitat of farmland; until then they had focused mainly on natural and semi-natural ecosystems.

In 2002 Potts agreed with the Duke that 90 per cent of the land would be used for farming and the remaining 10 per cent for conservation. This would demonstrate how to combine food production and wildlife revival in a sustainable way.

The Duke says: ‘In Britain we like to think we are right up there in the nature revival league, but we are the worst performer of the G10 countries. We are brilliant at writing reports and red-listing species that are heading for extinction, but we are hopelessly ineffective at actually reversing nature’s decline.’

Habitat improvement at Peppering began in earnest with the development of a farming system that could restore biodiversity in a way that worked alongside, rather than against, food production. This involved reducing the average size of each field, creating conservation headlands (margins where the use of chemicals is minimised) alongside existing hedgerows, and planting all new hedgerows on beetle banks.

As the fields became smaller and more numerous, there emerged a patchwork of crops and a rotation that maximised yields but also provided a safe, reliable food source for the grey partridges.

‘This was not an exercise in rewilding. Instead, it was trying to find a middle way whereby profitable farming could take place alongside the wholesale renaturing of the land,’ says the Duke. ‘Rewilding has its place, and Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, for instance, have done a wonderful job on the estate at Knepp Castle (also in West Sussex), but at Peppering we specifically target the revival of red-listed birds, wildflowers and insects as well as producing food to feed the world.’

If the Duke had the wisdom and experience of Potts to draw on for his project on his own doorstep in the South Downs, he had a well-connected and helpful friend in the shape of the late Duke of Edinburgh at Sandringham in Norfolk, and he approached him for assistance.

In March 2004, Prince Philip asked the then Sandringham headkeeper, David Clark, if he had enough grey partridges there to spare a few pairs for the Arundel project. ‘I’d like to send them five if I can,’ Prince Philip had told Clark, adding that he knew there had been a huge habitat improvement at Arundel, and he felt the greys would have a good chance of surviving and going on to breed.

Nine pairs arrived in West Sussex, where they stayed and nested, producing clutches of eggs. A few months later Potts wrote to the Duke of Edinburgh: ‘Sir, I feel sure you would like to hear more good news. The excellent results I reported in July became even better as the last of the harvest was cleared; one Sandringham pair had a wonderful brood of 17.’

Potts was able to decline the offer of a second consignment of birds the following year: ‘Like Eddie Norfolk and the rest of the team, I feel we really have enough birds, especially if they do as well as last season.’

The Duke’s estate has since passed grey partridges on to many other estates, ‘to share Prince Philip’s kindness’.

The most contentious of Potts’ ways to restore the greys is predator control. ‘No one likes it,’ says the Duke, ‘but we adopt best practice and operate strictly within the law at all times using modern traps and humane cable restraints [HCRs], never old-fashioned snares. But I understand it is a highly emotive subject.’

A young grey partridge emerging from its egg on the South Downs has an impressive array of predators that can be controlled, including crows and magpies, foxes (apparently some urban foxes routinely come up from Brighton 20 miles away), weasels, stoats and rats. HCRs are designed to allow certain non-target species, such as badgers and hares, to break free, and the estate’s keepers are required by law to check the restraints every day. On the rare occasions when a non-target species is caught, keepers are trained to release it without harm in a matter of seconds.

There have been protests over snaring on the estate, with campaigners complaining that the grey partridge revival has come at a cost. To address this, locals were invited on to the estate, with keepers available to show how best-practice traps and HCRs worked, and the Duke says the issue is never ducked in discussions, explaining why it is done and to the highest possible welfare standards.

At the end of July all traps are lifted, and nature is left to take its course for the rest of the year to find a new balance.

Now the partridges regularly number between 1,000 and 2,000 a year, but it was 2009 before Potts thought a surplus had been achieved, sufficient for a small shoot to go ahead. That October, the Duke, with four guests and his son Henry, lined up on the first drive and, by chance, he took the first shot at a grey partridge and downed it.

According to the Duke’s book The Return of the Grey Partridge (Profile Books, £20), written with Roger Morgan-Grenville, as the grey fell to earth one of the beaters remarked:

‘I wonder what that bird cost him.’ Indeed, the Duke admits with a laugh, if he had known the costs when he began the project, he’d have been taken aback. But he adds: ‘I’m determined to prove that the future renaturing of farming does not just have to be a rich person’s game.’

His vision? ‘We need to find a way where projects like Peppering can be self-funding. We need to bury our prejudices and work together. Let’s listen to all the science, not just to that bit that suits our entrenched positions. Let’s find the courage and humility to come together to bring about the revival in nature across arable England which we so desperately need.’

The knock-on effect of the grey partridge project can be seen everywhere at Peppering, he says. ‘In the field margins next to the 30 miles of newly planted hedgerows, you can see over 100 arable flowers, including many red-listed ones like the cornflower, prickly poppy, dwarf spurge and fumitories, and living on these flowers you’ll see 700 different species of insect, 10 per cent of which are nationally rare, including 50 different types of pollinating bees.

‘You’ll see a thousand hares, dormice, harvest mice, hedgehogs and water voles. There are raptors everywhere, and at night you can hear the nightingale, and at dawn the cuckoo and the turtle dove.’

The Duke’s enthusiasm is self-evident, and when Henry, his eldest son, follows him as the 19th Duke of Norfolk, he too will continue this legacy. ‘The idea that you can farm for nature and provide corridors of wildlife that link with hundreds of other farms that may be far smaller is a really exciting and important one,’ says Henry. ‘How could I not continue it?’

His father adds: ‘You don’t need a PhD to understand that things will get better if we take our feet off nature’s throat. In a way, that’s all we’ve done here. We’ve had to manage the process. It’s been expensive, time-consuming and sometimes very frustrating. But 20 years later, the whole place is alive again.

‘I love to see the twitchers and country lovers with smiles on their faces when they come and see the raptors, the partridges, corn buntings, lapwings and skylarks dancing on the wind.’

1 Body justified: And what next for the 18th Duke of Norfolk? His answer is to hand. ‘Curlews,’ he says. ‘Next year you just might see them breeding on the South Downs for the first time in 100 years.

1 Body justified: ‘I think if by some miracle my father could return to Peppering today and see what was going on, he could be forgiven for thinking he was back in 1930s Britain. He would say, “Eddie, it’s working – just get on with it.”’