Saving the sound of summer
European Turtle Dove has suffered a catastrophic decline. The RSPB’s Guy Anderson, Jake Zarins and Helen Moffat look at reasons behind the fall and the efforts being made to reverse the loss.
Once a quintessential sound of a British summer, European Turtle Dove has suffered a catastrophic decline in recent years. The RSPB’s Guy Anderson, Jake Zarins and Helen Moffat look at the reasons behind the fall and some unique conservation actions being taken to reverse the loss – as well as how you can help.
The purring call of a European Turtle Dove used to be one of those classic sounds of a rural summer – hazy warm sunshine on a rambling hedgerow with the hum of bees and swifts screaming overhead. These iconic birds punch well above their weight in our cultural heritage being long associated with peace, love, fidelity, the arrival of hope and good times – and of course the second day of Christmas. They appear frequently in art, poetry and literature from Europe and Asia, going back millennia.
Most people have heard of turtle doves and they’re greatly loved. Which makes their catastrophic decline since the late 1960s all the more distressing. We have lost a staggering 98% from the UK since then, and now have fewer than 4,000 breeding territories remaining. Until very recently, this decline has been relentless. The population trend graphs on the British Trust for Ornithology’s (BTO) BirdFacts web pages tell a sorry story. While some Common Bird Census and Breeding Bird Survey trend graphs fluctuate up and down over time, European Turtle Dove’s is an dramatic plummet towards an uncertain outcome. Thankfully we have some really good science to explain what’s driving this.
Annual breeding success of turtle doves in the UK almost halved between the 1960s and 1990s, the decades which saw the biggest declines. Breeding adults managed on average just one brood
per year rather than the two or three that was the norm 50 years ago. This coincided with a switch in diet, from the seeds of a wide variety of farmland ‘weeds’, to seeds of agricultural crops. Further research in the 2010s showed the importance of natural seed in the species’ diet – with nestlings and fledglings being in better condition and more likely to survive when they had more seedrich foraging habitat available close to the nest. Artificial food such as crop seeds and bird food was associated with adult birds being in better condition – but not so the young, who needed the more varied natural wild seed diet.
All the evidence points towards turtle doves being affected by the same seismic changes to our farmland systems over the last 75 years that have negatively impacted so much of our wildlife. We took away most of their food, so it’s not surprising they didn’t breed very successfully. We haven’t treated their nesting sites very well either. Tall, wide, dense hedgerows, unruly patches of bramble and thorny scrub are labelled ‘untidy’ and often get sprayed, flailed or removed.
This story is replicated across other countries where agriculture has been intensified to a similar level, such as
The Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany. But we also see declines – albeit more recent and not as steep – all the way across Europe.
The new European Breeding
Bird Atlas 2 shows that the heart of the species’ breeding range is central and southern Europe – it occurs at its highest densities in countries like Spain, France, Italy and Hungary. But even here it has declined recently. That’s why the species is now listed by IUCN as Globally Threatened (Vulnerable); not because it is particularly rare – there are millions of breeding pairs across the global range – but because the trend has been consistently downwards.
Shot down
Research in the sub-Saharan wintering grounds – countries such as Senegal and Mali – does not suggest any acute problems there for now. But a look along the three main migratory flyways reveals a second big problem – turtle doves have been hunted perfectly legally in a number of southern and central European countries for a long time.
The numbers being shot in recent decades have, however, become entirely unsustainable, especially for a population already beleaguered by low productivity. Again, the science is clear: population modelling convincingly shows that with recent levels of breeding success, unrestrained hunting will doom whole flyway populations to decline.
We have a migratory and, for now, still fairly abundant dove species, being hit hard by the twin problems of breeding habitat degradation and excessive hunting mortality. The parallels with Passenger Pigeon have not been missed. Thankfully, we have much more awareness of the problems faced by long-distance migratory birds, and the long-term risks they pose. We saw what happened to poor old Ecopistes migratorius, and serious conservation effort is being made to ensure that Streptopelia turtur doesn’t go the same way.
Efforts are being marshalled across both breeding range and flyways, co-ordinated under an international action plan for the species – a document with weight and impact. Adopted by the European Commission and the Convention on Migratory Species, the action plan forms the bedrock to conservation policy work and political pressure which is driving inexorable change to the hunting situation. We have already seen significant reductions in turtle dove hunting activity in France and Spain in the last two years, and with an EU decision about hunting in 2021 expected soon, we hope for more good news.
Giving the population breathing space from excessive hunting allows us to really push to improve breeding success, too, and there’s a growing number of landscape-scale projects across the remaining European Turtle Dove breeding range in England and northern Europe. They’re aimed
at improving the breeding habitats available for these birds – giving them the seeds they need to eat and dense vegetation to nest in. The Operation Turtle Dove website (www. operationturtledove.org) has news and more details of some of these initiatives including case studies and guidance videos.
The work – for example the RSPB’s Turtle Dove Friendly Zones Project – relies heavily on conservation partnerships. Typically, these are nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) working with statutory bodies (for example, the Turtle Dove Reverse Auction Test & Trial detailed on page 22), plus a wide range of businesses, farmers, landowners, communities and individuals.
Community action
This is not conservation restricted to a zoo or nature reserve. This is about encouraging, enthusing, advising and resourcing lots of people to take action themselves to help European Turtle Doves, on their land, on their farms and in their communities – it’s citizen conservation.
Plots of land managed to grow turtle dove foodplants are being created and nurtured. Supplementary seed food is being put out as an emergency measure to give adult doves a boost as they arrive from migration. Hedgerows are encouraged to ramble and grow, thorny scrub planted and allowed to spread. Freshwater drinking spots are created and managed. And all in easy reach of each other, to meet all the doves’ needs.
There are turtle dove heroes springing up everywhere – farmers spending time, effort and money getting their seed plots right, individuals buying land to manage it as their own private turtle dove nature reserve and fundraisers doing brilliant things to raise money.
The scale of activity varies hugely – from running a single supplementary feeding site for a few months each year to large long-term rewilding projects like Knepp Castle Estate creating large areas of fabulous nesting habitat. But all are valuable, and all will help European Turtle Doves, particularly if efforts can be co-ordinated in the key counties in eastern and southern England, where most breeding territories remain.
Given that the cause of turtle dove’s decline has also affected so much of the biodiversity of our countryside, it’s not surprising that the solutions being rolled out are also benefiting a wide range of other wildlife.
Ponds are excellent wildlife habitats, food plots hum with insects visiting flowering plants, and finches, buntings and partridges eat some of the resulting seed. Thorny, broadleaved scrub and hedgerows host warblers, Bullfinches, Common Nightingales, small mammals, butterflies, moths and myriad other invertebrates.
Wildlife networks
European Turtle Dove can act as a flagship species for whole communities of plants and animals that will benefit from the same conservation land management practices. As a result, we are starting to see the first glimmers of hope – birds regularly using supplementary food sites and seed plots, and signs that numbers of turtle doves have been stable on several project sites in Kent and Sussex.
If you live anywhere near the south-eastern quadrant of the UK, and don’t mind a few early starts this spring and summer, then there’s
another way you can help. It is 10 years since the fieldwork for the last Breeding Bird Atlas in the UK, and in order to update the current picture a UK survey of European Turtle Doves is running from May to July which needs lots of volunteer surveyors to AS a bird of the agricultural landscape, European Turtle Dove has borne the brunt of the relentless industrialisation of the countryside. Poorly considered incentives and a culture of tidiness have systematically removed safe nesting sites and sources of abundant and nutritious food from most of the species’ former range. Encouraging farmers to provide plots of early seeding arable plants maintained to provide the sparse open structure required by turtle doves is a key action in helping populations recover.
Following the UK’s departure from the EU and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), DEFRA is running a series of Test & Trial projects to investigate what might replace the CAP and fulfil the often-quoted mantra of ‘public money for public goods’. As part of these trials the RSPB identified an opportunity to test the application of ‘reverse auctions’ for funding specific cover 1-km squares using a standardised methodology. To find out more and to sign up for survey squares go to bit. ly/3mq7gFn.
Armed with invaluable information like this, good science to guide our solutions and land-use policies,
❝This is about encouraging, enthusing, advising and resourcing lots of people to take action themselves to help Doves❞ European Turtle
habitat creation for farmland species – in this instance turtle dove feeding plots.
Reverse auctions have already proven successful in funding a variety of land management practices, especially in relation to nitrate capture in water catchments, and DEFRA is keen to see if they can deliver other more complex environmental outcomes. Regular reverse auctions run much like a tendering process whereby bidders submit the price they are willing to do the work for – with lowest bids winning. In this instance, however, bids are also scored on the quality and proximity of nesting habitat and water to the proposed food plots. This means bids that best meet the specific requirements of turtle doves can be identified and selected.
Working across four zones in Norfolk and Suffolk the process has shown that alongside a suspicion around competitive mechanisms and many questions around what ‘public money for public goods’ might mean, there is and the continued dedication of a growing movement of turtle dove conservationists, we can be optimistic that in years to come new generations will hear the purring of European
Turtle Dove in a land much richer in life than it is now. ■ a real desire to see European Turtle Dove recover among the farming community.
This seems to be part of a broadly positive attitude shift among many land managers acknowledging that more needs to be done to help our farmed landscapes and the species that rely on them recover from the damage done over recent decades.
The first auction ran during late February and bids were received for more than 100 ha of food plots across two of the project zones. At the time of writing, bid analysis is ongoing, but those received are showing significant potential in terms of the scoring systems being used for two important purposes. The first relates to the targeting of investment where impacts are likely to be greatest rather than simply where it is cheapest or easiest to deliver. The second is that this approach might add value to important but undervalued farmland habitat such as ponds and the very dense scrub, bramble thickets and hedgerows required by turtle doves and many other species. The current regime offers farmers no reward for such habitat and it’s ruthlessly removed by the vast majority.
The project will run a further auction in June and resulting feed plots will be in place ready for the arrival of returning European Turtle Doves in spring 2022 and 2023. It is hoped that as well as generating important learning around the role of reverse auctions in delivering impact and value for money for taxpayers, these plots can be a contributing factor in aiding the recovery of this most iconic of British farmland birds. For more information visit www.entrade.co.uk/ feature/rspb.■