This year’s spring meeting of the EU Task Force on the recovery of birds provided noticeable updates of the Turtle Dove Adaptive Harvest Management.

In terms of population trends, an increase was detected in the Turtle Dove’s Western flyway, and further decrease in the Central/Eastern flyway, despite significant decrease of harvest was achieved by Member States (up to 65% reduction). More work is required to understand the drivers of these population trend changes.

Progress was made to the general process by conducting, at the request of FACE, an analysis of the reliability of the population trends projected by the model, which are used to inform on the sustainability of several hunting scenarios.

This was achieved by the scientific consortium by comparing the model’s projected trend with the observed population trend compiled by the Pan European Common Birds Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS). This work showed fairly good results produced by the model, but an apparent overestimation of the Turtle Dove’s population decrease was highlighted. This indicates that, regardless of the underlying causes, the impact of hunting on the population could be overestimated.

The report provides more details on these updates as well as insights about the latest progress in the Turtle Dove Adaptive Harvest Management.