Sardinia holds [an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10344-020-1360-9) of Barbary partridge, more than half of a European total put at 7,500 to 20,000 pairs. Gibraltar's last published count was 150 to 200 birds. Both places are in Europe, which makes the line repeated across most pages about Gibraltar's national bird, that this is Europe's only wild Barbary partridge, wrong. The accurate version is narrower and more interesting. Gibraltar holds the only self sustaining Barbary partridge population anywhere on the European mainland. Every other European bird of the species sits on an island, and the great majority sit on one island. The species was introduced to continental Portugal at some point, but we could find no evidence that anything survives there, which is why the careful sources put the qualifier on the claim rather than dropping it. The other word worth arguing over is wild. Partridges bred from Moroccan stock have been released onto the Rock in repeated batches since about 2014, by the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society and the Government's environment department. Whether what walks the Upper Rock today is a wild population, a maintained one, or something between the two is a fair question, and nobody has published an answer. Alectoris barbara was described by Bonnaterre in 1790 and runs [33 to 36 cm long](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_partridge), with a grey brown back, grey breast, buff belly, rufous streaked white flanks and red legs. The mark that settles it is the collar: a broad reddish brown gorget below a light grey face. Spain's red legged partridge, Alectoris rufa, is common across Spain and is not found in Gibraltar at all, so a partridge on the Rock is a Barbary partridge. It nests in a thinly lined scrape on the ground and lays 10 to 16 eggs. A clutch that size tells you most of what you need to know about how many chicks are expected to survive. It eats seeds and some insects, and it is the reverse design on Gibraltar's one penny coin. Nobody knows how the species reached Gibraltar. The [UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum factsheet](https://www.ukotcf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Gibraltar_BarbaryPartridge01.pdf) sets out three possibilities and declines to pick one: birds imported during the Moorish occupation, birds brought over by the British in the mid 1700s in a consignment of game from Barbary, or an indigenous population that was always here. It adds that the answer may be a combination of all three. The mid 1700s route carries two dates in the secondary accounts: a 1749 order by Governor Humphrey Bland authorising the import of game from Barbary for shooting, and the first Gibraltar records of the bird by the Reverend John White in 1771. We could not open the original Order Book, so treat those two dates as the received account rather than something we checked at source. Late Pleistocene Alectoris fossils have been found on the Rock, and they do not settle it either. The same factsheet notes those birds may have been ancestors of the red legged partridge rather than of this one. The honest position is that the origin is unresolved, and that Gibraltar is not unusual in this. Sardinia's population may also be an old introduction. So may the Canary Islands birds. Outside North Africa, what counts as a native Barbary partridge is an open question almost everywhere. This is the part almost nobody tells, and it is the part that explains the rest. The Upper Rock has not always been as green as it looks now. The 2005 [Upper Rock Nature Reserve management and action plan](https://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/new/sites/default/files/1/15/Upper_Rock_Nature_Reserve_Management_Action_Plan.pdf), written by Charles Perez and Keith Bensusan and published by GONHS, traces a landscape that went from presumably forested, to completely denuded during the Great Siege, and back again to dense maquis with scattered patches of garrigue and pseudosteppe. In the earlier phases goats and some cattle grazed the slopes and trees came down for fuel. The grazing kept the ground open. A Barbary partridge needs open ground. The plan is blunt about it: the species requires open areas in order to survive, and that habitat was becoming less common on the Upper Rock. It lists the bird as a Schedule 3 species under the Nature Protection Ordinance 1991 and, citing Tucker and Heath, as endangered within Europe. The firebreaks were supposed to supply that open ground. Instead the plan records that most firebreaks on the Upper Rock were mismanaged and growing steadily denser, to the point of becoming unsuitable even as feeding areas for bats. Rabbits, which want open ground for the same reasons, had thinned out alongside the partridge. So the mechanism is not exotic. Take away the grazers, stop cutting the firebreaks, let the maquis thicken, and a bird that needs bare rock and low scrub runs out of places to stand. Add feral cats, whi