Posted on behalf of Jacqui Weir, Woodland Biodiversity Advisor
Over the last few years I have been fortunate to be involved in several exciting conservation projects with the RSPB. In my current role I am a Woodland Biodiversity Advisor, encouraging landowners to manage their woodlands for wildlife as well as economic gain. Last summer I spent two months crawling through blackthorn bushes in Essex, looking for turtle doves.
Turtle dove populations have declined by around 90% since the 1970s. In large areas of the countryside they are now sorely missed, mainly due to the absence of their beautiful soft ‘purring’ song. Even sadder, people growing up in or visiting the countryside today may not even remember how British summer used to sound.
Turtle dove by Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)
Last year I was involved in research on turtle doves run by the RSPB Conservation Science department. The plan was to find as many turtle dove nests as possible by following radio tagged birds, to find out how many pairs successfully reared chicks – and if they were unsuccessful, to find out why. In practice this meant getting up at 4 am, walking round farms and driving round country lanes with a radio antenna sticking out of the window; fighting through dense blackthorn thickets on disused railway lines and in farm woodlands; and finally, picking maggots out of turtle dove corpses so that post mortem tests could be carried out. This was one of the most enjoyable summers of my career!
We don’t yet know the full reasons for the turtle dove’s decline, but we’re finding out more about them. They generally only eat seeds, particularly the small seeds of fumitory and various legumes – and plants like this have disappeared from a lot of the countryside. While they feed in fields or field edges, they nest in tall dense scrub, which could be in rural gardens, next to reservoirs, on golf courses, on minerals sites, along field boundaries or in woodlands or woodland edges. This illustrates the need for an integrated approach to conservation, rather than thinking in discrete habitat terms like ‘woodland’ or ‘farmland’.
Land owners and managers can help by maintaining or increasing the amount of breeding and feeding habitat where possible - and where nesting habitat is near to food and water, so much the better. Allowing plants like fumitory to persist where they are present, or planting seed mixes if they are not, will provide the food that turtle doves badly need. Tall dense scrub in field corners or along hedge lines next to ditches or tracks, and woodlands with a dense understory or a scrubby edge, can provide nesting sites with easy access to this food. Scrub needs to be tall – up to around 4 m in height, usually with climbing plants like honeysuckle, bramble or dog rose.
Field-edge scrub by Jenny Dunn (RSPB)
Farmland and woodland grant schemes contain options for managing scrub and for improving woodland structure. Woodland understory can be enhanced by heavily thinning canopy trees where appropriate, to allow more light in. Where scrub can not develop beyond the woodland boundary, woodland edges can be enhanced by thinning out some edge trees to allow understory regeneration (avoiding damage to any ancient boundary features). Woodland edge scrub can be coppiced on a 10 to 15 year rotation to maintain its structure, but avoiding creating gaps which may act as wind tunnels into the wood.
Unfortunately habitat change is not the only thing that turtle doves have to contend with. This species breeds here, but migrates to Africa in winter, and we are starting to look into conditions facing them on their wintering grounds and migration routes. Many are shot on migration through Europe and north Africa. And last year almost all our adults and chicks were infected with Trichomonas, a parasite that has massively affected greenfinch populations in the UK. So there’s a lot to find out and there are a lot of issues to tackle. But providing the right habitat for them here in the UK is bound to be a very good start.
Operation Turtle Dove is a partnership between the RSPB, Conservation Grade, Pensthorpe Conservation Trust and Natural England. Teams of RSPB advisors are working together with Natural England advisors, Conservation Grade farmers and a growing band of turtle dove friendly farmers to include much needed summer seed-rich habitats for the species across the core turtle dove areas of the East and South East of England.