Even more so than most farmland birds, the UK’s Turtle Dove population has suffered a precipitous 98% decline in the last fifty years and is still falling.

The UK population estimate in 2021 was 2092 breeding territories. Turtle Doves have become increasingly restricted to eastern and southeastern England, with 62.5% of the population estimated to occur in three counties: Kent (682 territories; 32.6%), Suffolk (326; 15.6%) and Essex (300; 14.3%). Marden has a significant number of breeding territories due partly to its arable farming with tall hedgerows and patches of scrub.

The fortunes of Marden’s turtle doves have been followed since 2015 when the RSPB and Operation Turtle Dove began trialling provision of supplementary seed in the spring to help the birds on their return from their wintering quarters in Africa. Now, as part of their conservation stewardship agreements with Natural England (NE), and with advice from Kent Wildlife Trust (KWT), local farmers are increasing provision of suitable habitat for the doves. Marden Wildlife volunteers and KWT’s Dr Kirsty Swinnerton are studying the doves’ use of the local farmland so that landowners can be helped to improve provision of natural food (seeds of ‘agricultural weeds’ like Fumitory and Birds’-foot Trefoil), nesting habitat (tall, thick hedges and scrub) and accessible water – as seedeaters, turtle doves get insufficient moisture from their seed diet for them to produce enough ‘pigeon milk’ secreted in their throats to feed their young.

Finding and tracking Marden’s Turtle Doves

By encouraging the public to report the presence of doves via our Marden Wildlife Facebook page, we began to build a picture of where they are across the parish. Given their need for thorny, scrubby nesting habitat, this is frequently on private land, but birds seen feeding on open farmland are more easily recorded. Trailcams on several farmland supplementary feeding sites provided evidence to suggest numbers and distribution but, beyond that, we had no understanding of how birds were using the landscape.

In 2022 we began colour-ringing doves. This was done by ringers fully licensed by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). Turtle doves are very shy and therefore difficult to catch, but five birds were fitted with coloured leg rings so they could be identified on sight. From this we confirmed they were regularly using the supplementary feeding sites or were found ‘purring’ on a prominent perch in their breeding territory.

As well as tracking the colour-ringed birds, the trailcams also evidence the numbers of doves using the food. Individual counts of three to four birds in May increased once juveniles fledged, with eighteen birds counted in a single picture in September.

Four of the five colour-ringed birds returned to breed here in 2023 – an adult survival rate of 80% when 50% is the norm. While this was very pleasing, it must be acknowledged our five birds was a very small sample!

Drilling down further

To offer landowners detailed advice, we need to know what features of the landscape are important to the birds. For this we need accurate information on where the doves go to feed, drink, nest, and roost.

In 2023, as well as colour-ringing another five doves with funding from KWT, we fitted three with GPS tags to tack their movements around the area for about a month. This required an additional permit from the BTO and attaching the tags was carried out by KWT’s Dr Chas Holt.

This is Luka (above) with her GPS tag and its two antennae; once released, the bird tucks the thin one trailing behind it in amongst its tail feathers when it preens. Luka flew some distance from the tagging site on the east of the village. When we located her, she had flown 4km due west, but although we connected with her tag, it had malfunctioned and would not transmit its GPS data to our receiver. Fortunately, she was later identified by her colour rings on one of our known breeding sites – complete with a mate and two recently fledged juveniles.

The movements of our second bird, George, not only replicated what we found from the previous year’s study about their use of feeding sites, but also confirmed what is generally expected of breeding turtle doves – he remained within a few kilometres of what we assumed was his breeding territory. We ground-truthed the GPS data by visiting the GPS points to compare them first-hand with the satellite image. Thus, we confirmed he was roosting in scrub on private land (so potentially vulnerable to being ‘tidied-up’ by a new owner). He was spending time feeding with other doves on bare patches of soil on a lightly tilled strip around a rapeseed crop, deliberately provided by the farmer as a conservation measure. There was also easy access to water via a field-corner pond. It was these features that were attracting all the doves to that field.

Those of our third dove (likely an un-paired male we had named Dave) painted a very different picture (see poster below) and raised many questions, not least being the possibility of other breeding doves in the wider area that have yet to be found. Having contacted some of the owners of the land he visited, we are now hoping to carry out further work with some of them.

In the coming months, assuming we can acquire funding, we intend to deploy more tags and, with the help of an MSc student from the Durrel Institute of Conservation and Ecology, to look more closely at turtle dove and nightingale breeding habitat – both share similar habitat but have specific and very different, needs for nesting.

If you are interested in our work and would like to help – we particularly need volunteers to make regular checks of images on trail cameras, and to survey small areas of the doves’ breeding territories – please contact us.

 

2026 Update

We have colour-ringed a further seven doves, bringing the total of our known, individually identifiable birds to thirty-four. Of the twenty-seven ringed in previous years, we have re-sighted fifteen this year, including one of last year’s newly fledged birds. A very small sample, but suggesting the survival of juveniles and adults is not declining.

Perhaps the most significant re-sighting is that of Georgie. She was one of our first birds ringed in May 2022 and had been caught on camera in Marden every year since (see the 2024 update above for more information). However, she wasn’t seen in Marden this summer. After at least five years breeding here, she had moved north to Maxey in the Fen Country around Peterborough, where she was photographed and identified by her colour rings.

Notable re-sightings of a second bird, Adrienne, also proved significant in that they have consolidated the information we gained from the GPS tag she carried last year, as described in the 2025 update above.

That was the first time a single turtle dove had been shown to be nesting and feeding in places so far apart – Bedgebury Forest in the High Weald and arable farmland in the Low Weald. It could, of course, have been just a chance occurrence and not a general pattern. However, from images captured this year on two trail cameras 10km apart, she was shown to be doing the same again, on the same sites. So likely an established, not chance, behaviour.

With funding from Natural England, another four doves were GPS tagged in June. One of them also carried a tag last year, so her data will be cumulative with added value as a result.

We were disappointed that the first tag deployed (on Hawkstone, trapped on a farm that grows hops for Jeremy Clarkson’s beer) only worked for a few days before it malfunctioned. Fortunately, he was tracked on camera by his colour rings, so we know he remained in the area until he left on migration in mid-September.

 

Another male, Freddie, tagged at a feed site in Bedgebury Forest was shown to be nesting over the border in Sussex.

Particularly important information was gained from Anne, demonstrating how her nesting, feeding and drinking sites were spread over 5km, well beyond the ‘magic 300m’ turtle doves are considered to need.

Our trail camera data show that visits to one of our key sites have increased by 10.5% this year.

Operation Turtle Dove Home – Operation Turtle Dove has confirmed that a count of twenty-three doves captured together in one picture is the highest recorded in England this year.

Many thousands of hours of audio recordings have been analysed to investigate turtle doves’ territorial ‘purring’ on a Kent-wide, and site-by-site basis.

The information this provides can be crucial for detecting breeding (and has been used in a dispute with a developer to demonstrate the species’ presence). Software created by member Nick de Smith, using the renowned Cornell University bird sound database (used in the Merlin phone app) it has been made freely available and is already being used by researchers in universities and conservation organisations across the world. It can be found here: BirdNET-Pulse Report Generator.

Our farmland birds research is made possible by our many volunteers’ countless hours of sifting through photos and GPS data and working alongside farmers and landowners on habitat creation.

It has underpinned Kent Wildlife Trust’s (and MW’s) inclusion in a three-year, £0.5 million DEFRA funded project. Partnered by RSPB who will be carrying out a second national turtle dove survey, and Natural England trialling new approaches with farmers to restoring the doves’ essential ‘arable weed seed’ diet, our work around Marden will be extended across the county.