European Turtle Dove

Voice

A deep, sustained purring turrr-turrr, usually in series of three to five, with a drowsy droning quality like a distant engine. Heard only from late April to early August, mainly in the first hours after dawn and again in the last hour of light before dusk.

Identification

Small, slim dove with orange-brown, black-scalloped upperwing coverts, a blue-grey head and a pink breast. A patch of black-and-white bars marks the side of the neck. The black tail is broadly tipped white, obvious as the bird flies away. Flight is fast and flicking on sharply angled wings; juveniles are duller and lack the neck bars.

Confusion species

Collared Dove is larger, paler and plain sandy, with a black neck collar rather than a striped patch and a much plainer wing. Feral Barbary Doves are paler still. At range go by flight: Turtle Dove is shorter, more compact and beats its wings faster and more jerkily.

Habitat

Small-scale farmland with dense scrub, thorn hedges, hawthorn thickets, young plantations and woodland edge, ideally beside weedy arable fields and drinking pools. In Iberia also old olive groves, dehesas and riverside gallery woodland with open, seed-rich ground nearby.

Range and movements

Breeds across almost all of Europe; every bird winters in the Sahel. In the Netherlands it is now a scarce, much-reduced species of Limburg, the Achterhoek and a few dune areas. In Spain it is still widespread, densest in the west and south, but clearly declining there too.

• Breeding (summer)
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

May and June, between sunrise and nine o'clock, along an old hedge or thorn thicket in small-scale country: listen for the purr first, then look for a bird on a wire or a dead branch. In Spain, watch a farmland drinking pool at first light.

Conservation status

In steep decline across Europe. The causes are the loss of weed seeds and drinking pools on farmland, the grubbing out of scrub, hunting along the flyway and drought in the Sahel. Recovery plans rest on a hunting moratorium and seed-rich field margins; any recovery is still fragile.