Introduced to Britain, the Red-legged Partridge is an escaped gamebird now at home in the countryside. They are certainly eye-catching birds, with delicious white bibs, rufous and grey plumage that is graphicly outlined with thick black edges and stripes, and with striking red-legs.
 
This is the real partridge in the pear tree of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and one I have long wanted to needle felt as a tiny to-scale winter bird in sparkling snow. He stands in a stripe of fresh green grass between two twinkling snowy banks, just as you might find him nervous at the field-edge, eying you warily, with his leg raised ready to run away at the slightest provocation. To the front of him is an equally tiny stem of Shephard’s Purse, a common wild flower of town and countryside with heart-shaped seed heads, and over his shoulder is a tiny branch of shiny-leaved green holly, filled with bright red wool berries as befits the holly at Christmas.
 
Entirely made from blended shades of Corriedale wool, with tiny glass eyes and yarn wrapped wire legs, the partridge is 4cms long, 3.5cms tall and 1.5cms wide and took 5 hours to hand-make. The wool and trilobal fibre snowy hedgerow scene is 6cms wide and 6.5cms tall. The plants are made of wool and plant-fibres including cotton and banana, with yarn-wrapped wire and are hand-painted in inks. Contained within an 11cm tall and 10cms wide & 32cms circumference glass-domed and cork-based snow globe.
 
I wasn’t completely sure what I was looking at when I first saw a wild Red-legged Partridge whilst staying with my sister and her girls in Norfolk. We were next to a lakeside nature reserve in a barn-converted holiday house, and I could sneak away very early in the morning to bird watch before everyone else had finished breakfast. My first sighting was at the end of the drive, under a dark hedge forming the boundary of a very old farmhouse. Honestly, the partridge looked quite comical, almost like a cartoon drawn and come to life. He stood on one leg, fixing me with that bright orange-ringed stare as if unsure exactly what we were supposed to do in this unlikely meeting. There was heavy dew on the grass, so the scene was all green, grey and sparking in the early morning light. It was truly magical and the memory inspired the character of this tiny chap several years later.