What is the "best" game bird?

We asked our readers and members to help us resolve the debate once and for all. Obviously everyone has their own definition of ‘best’ so we asked you all to give nine of the most commonly targeted birds a score out of ten for what we think are the key attributes of a great quary species: speed, agility, tastiness, wildness and cost. We also asked people to state what they considered to be their own favourite bird.

The best UK game bird - the runners and riders

• Pheasant
• French partridge
• English partridge
• Red grouse
• Mallard
• Teal
• Wood Pigeon*
• Woodcock
• Snipe

*Note - while the wood pigeon is technically not a game bird, it is so beloved of shots everywhere that we felt they needed to be included in the survey.

What is the UK’s favourite game bird?

The final question of the survey asked people to say which was their favourite game bird  there’s some stiff competition. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, the King of Gamebirds, the Red grouse, topped the list, with 24% of respondents listing it as their favourite. Pheasant follows in a fairly distant second place with 15%, while woodcock secured a bronze with 12% of the vote. Teal, by contrast, bring up the rear in the popular vote, with just 5% of respondents listing it as their favourite. In the middle of the field the race was tight, with English and French partridge, and woodpigeon separated by a mere feather’s breadth, and mallard and snipe similarly neck-and-neck. 

1. Red Grouse
2. Pheasant
3. Woodcock
4. (equal) French Partridge, Wood pigeon
5. -
6. English Partridge
7. Snipe
8. Mallard
9. Teal

What is the ‘best’ game bird? Another way of looking at it

But do these rankings match up with the scores attributed to them? To find out we compiled a table of the average scores given to each species for each category, then added them together to give a final score out of 50.

This gives a somewhat surprising result:

So let’s take a look at how we’ve ended up with the two most commonly reared and released birds - pheasant and red leg partridges - propping up the leaderboard in ninth and eighth place respectively, the humble ‘pest’ species the wood pigeon sitting pretty at the top, and a solid if unimpressive fifth place for the bird that most people call their favourite, the red grouse.

Are pigeons the ultimate test of skill?

Let's start with the overall winner - wood pigeons. As anyone who has tried to tackle the ‘grey grouse’ and come off second best will attest, pigeons present a challenge for even the best shots in the land. They’re wild, with all the razor-sharp senses and instincts that this brings with it. Being on the menu for a wide array or predators has given them incredible reflexes and agility, such that with a flare of the tail or the flip of a wing they can seemingly ‘dodge’ your shot. Couple that with the need for great fieldcraft and their decent turn of speed and you’ve got the recipe for a worthy adversary. The fact that free pigeon shooting is fairly easy to come by also helps!

Why aren’t grouse the best game bird?

Simple: the cost. Grouse score highly on everything from speed and agility to wildness and tastiness, but fall down hugely on price. At around £200 per brace for driven grouse, they are beyond most people’s means, even in the fairly affluent shooting community. 

Why do French partridge and pheasants fare so badly?

It may, at first glance, seem somewhat surprising that the two most commonly shot game birds are languishing at the bottom of the table, but it perhaps highlights the reasons that most driven shoots are stocked with these species. Simply put, pheasants and redlegs are the most straightforward to rear, release and present over guns in a challenging way. Being for the most part reared birds means that they both lose out when it comes to the wildness criteria, and even the most ardent pheasant shot couldn’t claim that their agility is much to write home about. 

Interestingly, pheasants are somewhat under-appreciated for their speed in these rankings, since they are, according to the best figures we can find, the third speediest of the birds on this list - perhaps their size counts against them here. 

Are teal the most underappreciated game bird?

As mentioned above, teal were the least likely bird on the list to be regarded as someone’s favourite quarry, but does that do these lovely little ducks an injustice, given their third place finish in our ranking? Anyone who, like me, has sat in a drainage ditch in Norfolk on a November evening, the light fading and a chill East wind whipping across from the Urals, will be able to confirm that there are fewer greater challenges. Although they're not quite as fast as their scores would suggest, the combination of low light and their tendency to appear out of the darkness and drop like a stone makes them, I would say, among the most rewarding species to target in the UK, since the sense of achievement is so high if you actually manage to get one in the bag.

An endless debate

While this was an attempt to find the ultimate answer to a perennial gunbus debate, it is just possible that we have highlighted what makes it a perennial debate. What do you make of these rankings? Was there an important factor that we didn’t include in our scoring system that would have changed things? Was your favourite species left out of the running altogether? Let us know in the comments!