Samantha Lee, RSPB
Photo: RSPB Images
Operation Turtle Dove: From Suffolk to Senegal (and back again)
Titan the tagged Turtle Dove
In 2014, two Suffolk Turtle Doves were fitted with satellite tags. With an autumn migration of over 5,000km to take on, there were no guarantees that either bird would successfully survive migration back to their wintering grounds, or that they would complete the full round trip back and return to Suffolk the following year. However, against the odds and in a UK science first, one of them did. Titan the Turtle Dove, tagged in a garden on the Suffolk coast, revealed for the first time the migration route, wintering grounds and stopovers that a UK breeding Turtle Dove makes. Flying mostly under the cover of darkness, Titan flew across epic landscapes such as the Atlas Mountains, Sahara Desert and the Gulf of Cadiz. The satellite tag also uncovered that he travelled around 500-700km per night flying at a maximum speed of 60km per hour. Titan’s outbound journey to Africa, where he wintered for six months, took around a
month to complete. On his return trip, the avian jetsetter spent two weeks making his way through France, initially following the Atlantic coast, before leaving Dunkirk and touching down in Suffolk on 22nd June, within the same area where he was first found and tagged. Over the summer, Operation Turtle Dove staff tried to catch up with Titan, but, despite regular sightings, were not able to discover if he successfully found a mate and produced young. Titan departed once more for his West African breeding grounds on 17th September last year, safely reaching his wintering grounds by the second week of October. Unfortunately, due to local political instability, our research team was not able to follow Titan to Mali; however in October a team of two researchers from the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science travelled out to Senegal and recently returned for a second stint in mid-January.
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