Abstract
In the nineteen-thirties an American game biologist first described game as a "crop" and the term has stuck. Game can always be a useful and sometimes a valuable by-product of the farm. In pre-war days, wild game needed little encouragement except a hefty gamekeeper to prevent poaching (advertisements always recorded height and weight!), rigorous predator control and grain feeding in hard weather. A wild partridge and a wild pheasant shot per acre was not uncommon on the lighter soils.
Nowadays intensive farming and softwood forestry have changed the picture. But with skilled management and a little give-and-take on the farm, good shooting - certainly of pheasants and red-legged partridges - is possible and predictable.