On the wings of a turtle dove

Dainty, smaller and darker than its collared cousin, the turtle dove is in danger of dying out, but not if a new Norfolk-based trust has anything to do with it

- Robin Page

Beautiful both to see and hear, the turtle dove is a jewel of the summer months

I MUST confess to being in a state of vigorous competition with a manic birdwatcher at the moment-our 10year-old grandson, Henry. I'm very pleased that he's wildlife-crazy, but it does put all my books in danger, particularly my favourite—which has also become his Birdsong: 150 British and Irish Birds and Their Amazing Sounds. It's a fantastic book, although, sadly, I believe it's already out of print. It seems that half my life is now spent preventing Henry from taking the book home with him. The other half is spent listening to wonderful recordings of both the turtle dove and the cuckoo's calls.

This summer, it's my ambition to show Henry turtle doves and to let him hear for himself the wonderful purring call of the summer bird, which I have not heard on my Cambridgeshire farm for far too many years. Then, the last badly built nest was quickly predated, I suspect by one of those dark marauding birds that Wild Justice wants to protect. What a bizarre world we live in.

There's only one word to describe the decline of the turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) and that's tragic. According to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), between 1967 and 2018 (only 51 years), numbers of turtle doves declined by 98%. In 2020, it was estimated that the breeding population was a mere 3,600 pairs. Yet Anthony Cheffings, a good Kenyan friend of mine who has just been to Chad, found hundreds of thousands of wintering turtle doves there. Saying there were 'too many to count', he's assuming that they were birds from Eastern Europe and Russia.