RSPB plans to tag more turtle doves

More research into why turtle dove populations are declining is needed, say experts.

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James Fair

Published: July 4, 2016 at 5:42 am

The RSPB is planning to put satellite tags on 10 more turtle doves this year as it steps up its efforts to find out why numbers are crashing so precipitously.

The signal from the one individual tagged to date – known as Titan – was lost earlier this year when the bird was known to be in Mali.

In the UK, populations have plummeted by 91 per cent since 1995, while across Europe there has been a 78 per cent decline since 1980.

While conservationists know that turtle doves are experiencing food shortages when they arrive in the UK in the spring and that this is contributing to the problems they face, less is known about the conservation issues in their wintering grounds of West Africa.

“Titan was great, but we need a bigger sample size,” said Tara Proud of the RSPB’s Operation Turtle Dove programme. “We have currently caught and tagged three more, and we are trying to catch more.”

Wildlife journalist

James Fair writes about wildlife conservation and broader environmental issues for a wide range of publications, including BBC Wildlife and BBC Countryfile magazines. James started his career as a journalist in the early 1990s, then spent a number of years working on conservation projects in South America, including an ultimately doomed effort to reintroduce an orphaned Andean bear cub into the wild in Bolivia. In 1999, James joined BBC Wildlife as a commissioning editor, while later filling the roles of staff writer, environment editor and keyboard destroyer-in-chief. In 2018, he went freelance, and now takes on a range of news, feature and report writing assignments, and is also the editor of the membership magazine of the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES). In 2019, he published his second book, 100 Great Wildlife Experiences: What to see and where.

Turtle dove, Streptopelia turtur, single bird on branch, Bulgaria, May 2013

© Nature Picture Library/Getty