When doves cry

The voice of the turtle! As the lines from the Song of Solomon imply, it’s as lovely a thing as you will ever hear: not the groaning of a reptile but the purring of a dove: the turtle dove named not for its tortoise-like nature but for its voice: in Latin turtur, in French tourterelle, in Chaucerian English turtel. This bird has been in drastic decline; in Europe it’s down 83% since 1980. But now – get your scope out! – there’s actually some good news.

Turtle doves are the only species of dove that leaves Europe in the autumn – and like all winter absentees, they bring great joy on their annual return. A few decades back you could see and hear them most days in the spring and summer countryside: now they’re birds to boast about. I heard one in May in North Norfolk: the first for a good few years.

Turrr! Turrr! For some reason I associate the sound with Edwardian cricket matches, the village against the Squire’s XI, The Go-Between, or the Flower Show Match in Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man – a time of idyll when nothing could ever go wrong and the first world war would never happen.

A vanished world: and the turtle dove has vanished with the old certainties. The bird hung on longer than pre-war innocence, but in the last 30 years the species has declined more than 90% in the UK. I did an ornithological survey of a small farm in 2005 and counted seven or eight singing turtle doves; back then this was regarded as pleasing rather than miraculous.

There are two main reasons for the decline. One is in the realm of the Bleeding Obvious; the other is right under our noses, all the easier to overlook. There’s a basic moral lesson here: it’s so much easier to blame foreigners than to try to do better ourselves. 

Bird migration is one of the great wonders of the global ecosystem. In earlier ages the very idea seemed impossible: even the great 18^th-century naturalist Gilbert White believed that swallows spent their winters buried at the bottom of ponds. 

But birds travel. After all, they have wings. Turtle doves routinely commute from their breeding grounds in Europe to their wintering lands in west Africa, south of the Sahara. They travel in flocks over set routes, mostly involving as little sea as possible.

This involves an annual double-trip, and it’s perilous enough as it stands. Even in past millennia, more started the great journey than finished it. 

But it got a great deal harder when humans started shooting migrating birds out of the sky. For a century and more they have been shot on the way down and shot on the way back. Shot in prodigious numbers.

It’s culture, it’s tradition, it’s tasty, it’s bloody good fun; all unanswerable arguments put forward in favour of the twice-yearly slaughter. In many places a great deal of the hunting is legal. About four million birds are shot every year. And then all at once the shooting stopped.

Or at least, it did along the migration route known as the Western Flyway, which goes through Portugal, Spain and France: a simple decision that puts a million more turtle doves in the European ecosystem every year. 

The argument against hunting the turtles was simplicity itself: carry on in the same old traditional and cultural way and the hunting will stop whether you wish it or not, because you’ll have no birds left to kill. Annual bags were decreasing with shocking swiftness: there was no room left for denial.

The argument in favour of a never-ending hunt is 12,000 years old, as old as agriculture: the idea that nature is (a) never-ending and (b) the implacable foe to humankind. These beliefs don’t stand up for a second when the actual facts are taken into account, but they are embedded in the collective human mind.

So collate the actual facts, present them to everyone involved and see what happens. “It was easier than I thought,” said Andy Evans, head of global species recovery at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Meetings involving everyone who had an interest in turtle doves resulted in widespread agreement that the situation had become unsustainable.  “The hunting lobby knew that turtle doves were declining,” Evans said.

Hard evidence and real numbers carried the day: solid data presented to the European Commission allowed them to take a science-based approach to an emotional and deeply polarising issue. The figures came from a European network of mostly volunteer observers, the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme.

Precise information showed the exact rate of loss. The potential benefits of a moratorium on shooting were at last obvious: spelt out in incontestable numbers. 

The RSPB, Operation Turtle Dove and wildlife conservation organisations along the Western Flyway were not arguing that it was immoral to shoot doves. Rather, they allowed the numbers to make it clear that continued shooting was against the interests of the shooting community. They discussed adaptive harvest management: the principle behind sustainable fisheries. The numbers showed that taking out a million turtle doves every year is unsustainable.

So they stopped. They actually stopped. And the figures after the stoppages of both 2021 and 2022 already show sharp increases. The ban continued into 2023 and then was extended into the current year. 

There has been a 25% increase in turtle doves along the Western Flyway as a direct result. the number of breeding birds is now at its highest level since 2011. 

Further increases will certainly be recorded when the full results for 2023 and 2024 are all in – these things take a great deal longer to process than an outsider would believe possible, largely because these numbers come from so many different sources. It’s birdwatching and nature conservation expressed as mathematics.

For centuries turtle doves have purred and turred through folklore and legend and literature. Their elaborate pair-bonding and love of togetherness has made them symbols of love and fidelity. The chorus of The Tavern in the Town continues:

And on my breast carve a tur-ur-tur-le dove

To signify I died of love

Died of love!

Chaucer wrote of “the wedded turtel with her herte trewe”. Shakespeare wrote The Phoenix and the Turtle; I remembered my surprise on learning it was about a dove and symbol of love, rather than one of the testudines. 

And the bastards were killing them – but these things are never wholly straightforward. There’s a second important reason for turtle dove decline: and it’s the way we farm the land in Europe, including Britain: as if nature were an implacable enemy. We still tend to farm as if anything that lives on farmland – apart from crops and livestock – is an abomination. 

This thinking has done the turtle doves out of places where they can breed. They like to nest inside deep hedgerows and dense thickets and to feed on seeds available on open ground, like chickweed and fumitory. Access to clean water is essential. So when we cultivate every last square inch of farmland, we lose stuff.

Agricultural efficiency and unsustainable shooting caught the doves in a pincer-movement, bringing about their catastrophic decline. But in places with less intense land management, turtle dove numbers are building up again. In 2019 there were 80 turtle dove territories in Sussex – once a turtle dove stronghold. Twenty of these territories were on the famously rewilded Knepp Estate.

The mania for monoculture is increasingly seen as a generational thing. It is dying out, or at least beginning to. The notion that the countryside needs to be more than a food factory is spreading. A wildlife-rich countryside is good for human health, both physical and mental. There are even risqué arguments that wildlife is worth saving for its own sake.

Over the last decade the turtle dove, the bird of faithful love, became a symbol of despair: a bird that stands for an escalating war against nature that is ultimately against our own interests. 

Hard to believe, but there really is a bit of hope. The Central European Flyway is still shot to buggery, especially on Malta, but there is now an irrefutable argument against the hunters: if you want to continue hunting you must stop hunting, at least for a while. Like they are doing further west. And on the farmland, monoculture is slightly less fashionable than it was 10 years ago. 

In other words, I might hear another turtle dove next year. Or even two.