Their final Days?
THE song The 12 Days Of Christmas mentions a lot of different birds, but two stand out to me because they’re the among Europe’s fastest-declining species. As we take a look at the tiny turtle dove and the grey partridge, let’s hope they are around for many more Christmases to come!
Turtle doves are one of the smallest members of the pigeon family. They are half the size of a wood pigeon and surprisingly well camouflaged. They are usually recognised by their call, which gives them their name. It supposedly sounds like the word “turtle”, although it doesn’t. At all. But whoever had a say in naming them thought it did, so let’s give them points for imagination.
The poor turtle dove has declined about 90% in the British Isles. Our only migrating pigeons, they used to stop here to breed on trips around Europe and north Africa. But numbers have plummeted. Their favourite food is the seeds from once-common weeds, but with more efficient farming methods these poor birds are finding less to eat on their travels.
Second up we have the grey partridge. “Grey partridge?” I hear you in the east cry. “But I see them in the fields all the time, so how can they be rare?” Well, you may be surprised to find out that they are in serious trouble and their numbers are dropping.
Like many game birds, our native partridge is bred in large numbers in captivity in the UK and released out into the wild specifically for people to hunt. But even with this help and clutch sizes of more than a dozen eggs at a time, they aren’t recovering. There is a strange thing to note about the grey. They are pretty much exclusively ground-dwellers, and even fly very low to the floor. So you aren’t ever likely to see one perched in a pear tree!