A black page in the French partridge's history: the melanistic variety of Red-legged Partridge Alectoris rufa

The melanistic variety of Red-legged Partridge Alectoris rufa was described from a small population in western France around the 1850s. In this region, Red-legged Partridge population as a whole was hunted, but melanistic individuals were targeted for both private and museum bird collections, and by 1865 the variety was extinct in western France. An extensive search for extant specimens documented 13 melanistic birds in six museums, and their details are presented here. Remarkably, some of these specimens were collected in areas elsewhere in France or even in other countries. After 1915, the allele for melanism appears to have been lost within the Red-legged Partridge population as a whole, and we discuss possible reasons for this.

Citation

Hein van Grouw, Ludovic Besson, and Benoît Mellier "A black Page in the French partridge's history: the melanistic variety of Red-legged Partridge Alectoris rufa," Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 138(4), (14 December 2018). https://doi.org/10.25226/bboc.v138i4.2018.a7

Type

Journal Article

Item Description

© 2018 The Authors; This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.
NHM Repository

ISSN

0007-1595

EISSN

2513-9894