Advice
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Advice
Turtle Dove conservation - Advice for farmers
Turtle Doves are a summer visitor to the UK. They are mostly found on farmland where they nest in thick scrub and feed on the ground on the seeds of wildflowers.
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Turtle Doves in brief
In the UK, Turtle Doves are now concentrated in southern and eastern England with groups of breeding birds as far north as North Yorkshire. The UK population of Turtle Doves declined by 99% between 1967 and 2023. An RSPB-led national survey of Turtle Doves estimated 2,100 breeding territories present in 2021.
Good scientific evidence tells us that there are two things that must be done to recover the UK population of this long-distance migratory species:
- Improve annual productivity – the number of chicks reared to fledging by each breeding pair each year - by providing the right feeding habitats (seed-rich vegetation) on their breeding grounds in the UK
- Ensure that we do not see any return to unsustainable levels of hunting of Turtle Doves along their migration through France, Spain and Portugal.
The good news is we’re making great progress on both fronts.
Operation Turtle Dove, a partnership project between Natural England, Pensthorpe Conservation Trust, Fair to Nature and the RSPB, is working with farmers and other land managers to provide high quality breeding habitats for Turtle Doves in their UK strongholds in East Anglia and south-east England. In 2024 alone, Operation Turtle Dove worked with 442 landowners to provide the equivalent of 223 football pitches of prime feeding habitat.
The RSPB led on an international conservation action plan that resulted in a hunting management system that has been in place in France, Spain and Portugal since 2021. Since then, the western European breeding population of Turtle Doves increased by over 30% in just three years.
If you own or manage land in eastern or southern England, you can play a vital role to help Turtle Doves. With the prospect of increasing numbers of birds reaching our shores in the coming years, the most effective action you can take to support Turtle Doves is to provide feeding and nesting habitats. If you are based in East Anglia, or south-east England, your local Operation Turtle Dove adviser can help provide advice on creating and managing these habitats.
Key points
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Turtle Doves require three key breeding season resources, ideally within 300m of each other: feeding habitat (seed-rich plants), nesting habitat (dense hedges and scrub) and accessible water (such as shallow ponds). Providing these resources will benefit Turtle Doves as well as a range of other farmland wildlife. For example, birds like Nightingales, Bullfinches, and many warblers benefit from scrubby nesting habitat and pollinators benefit from flower-rich habitats.
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Ensure there is seed food available throughout the spring and summer, for example, by allowing plants to regenerate naturally or sowing a bespoke mix. Supplementary feeding is another way of providing Turtle Doves with food when wild seeds are scarce early in the spring.
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Maintain tall, thick hedgerows and areas of scrub and allow the shrub layer to develop along woodland edges for nesting.
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Create, restore or maintain wet features in the landscape such as farm ponds with shallow edges allowing birds access to the water.
What this species needs
A continuous supply of seeds from wild plants and crops from late April until the end of August.
Both adults and chicks need small seeds of annual and perennial plants. Commonly used examples include clovers, medicks, fumitory, Scarlet Pimpernel, knotgrass, chickweeds as well as some crop seeds including oilseed rape and cereal grains.
They feed on the ground in weedy areas, especially where the vegetation is short and sparse, with patches of bare ground and where there are areas of spilt grain and stubbles after harvest. Areas of low vegetation and bare ground are important as they allow the birds to access their seed food.
Tall, wide mature hedgerows, areas of scrub or woodland edges with a thick shrub layer for nesting.
Most Turtle Doves nest in mature, thorny broadleaved scrub or tall, thick hedgerows. They prefer thorny species such as Hawthorn and nests are often associated with climbers such as Traveller’s Joy (Wild Clematis), honeysuckle or bramble.
How to help
On arable land
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Cultivate an area of land and allow plants to naturally grow up. The plants that grow may provide seeds for Turtle Doves to eat. For more information on establishing such plots, please visit the Operation Turtle Dove website.
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In some circumstances, particularly on heavy soils, natural regeneration of plants may be difficult due to excessive plant growth. In these cases, we recommend first speaking to your local Natural England or RSPB adviser to explore how you can make the natural regeneration option work. However, if this is not possible, a sown seed mix beside a track or open ground can be used as an alternative. For more information, visit the Operation Turtle Dove website.
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Stubbles created early in the summer, particularly from oilseed rape or other small-seeded crops can provide valuable foraging for Turtle Doves. If possible, leave these stubbles uncultivated until the end of August.
On grassland
- Allow natural regeneration or introduce sown mix seed plots following cultivation to provide a seed-rich habitat in pastoral areas. Wherever there are species-rich meadows which can be restored to hay meadows or clover leys within the rotation, these may provide food for Turtle Doves on mixed farmland, however access for the birds will need to be considered. Turtle Doves require areas of short vegetation with bare ground on which to forage – maintaining patches or strips of low vegetation within any suitable meadows or leys is likely necessary to allow the birds to access the seed.
Hedgerow, woodland edge and scrub management
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Maintain hedgerows which are wide and more than 3m tall and retain climbing plants such as Traveller’s Joy (Wild Clematis), honeysuckle and bramble in mature hedgerows.
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Maintain areas of tall scrub around the farm and allow hedges to grow out at hedgerow junctions in field corners to create larger areas of scrub.
Pond management
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Maintain shrubby edges to woodland blocks and allow these to encroach outwards into fields where appropriate to provide more tall scrub cover for nesting Turtle Doves. Allowing tall scrub to develop on the northern side of a pond can provide suitable nesting habitat without shading the pond.
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Avoid management and cutting between March and September (inclusive) as Turtle Doves can still breed in August.
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Create or restore farm ponds with shallow edges to allow access for the birds.
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Ponds should not be shaded on all sides by vegetation – there should be some open areas to allow Turtle Doves to access the pond.
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Take action to limit the potential for pesticide or fertiliser contamination of the pond.
Supplementary feeding
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Providing supplementary seed food for Turtle Doves when they return to the breeding areas in spring can help adult birds get into good breeding condition and will help to bridge the gap when native wildflower seed is scarce.
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Operation Turtle Dove has devised a protocol for providing supplementary food for Turtle Doves. Trials of the protocol have proved it to be effective and safe, with no evidence of increased risk of disease transmission between birds. Therefore, Operation Turtle Dove recommends that the protocol is followed closely to maintain effectiveness and safety. The protocol can be found on the Operation Turtle Dove website.
