Türkentaube Ardennes

The Eurasian collared dove (Streptopelia decaocto) reaches a body length of about 31 to 33 centimetres, making it roughly the size of a feral pigeon. The plumage is uniformly pale sandy-grey to light brown, and the species is most easily recognised by the narrow black, white-edged half-collar on the nape, which gives it its name. In flight, the long tail with a broad white terminal band is conspicuous, and the call is a monotonous, three-syllable cooing.

In the German-speaking countries the collared dove is almost exclusively a synanthropic species and breeds within the settled landscape. It prefers villages, urban fringes, parks, cemeteries, gardens with tall solitary trees and farmsteads, where grain, poultry feed or domestic waste provide a reliable year-round food supply. Closed forests and intensively cleared farmland are largely avoided. The species is resident, breeds from March well into autumn and raises several overlapping broods, with the clutch normally containing two eggs.

The collared dove is one of the most striking range expansions in European bird life in the twentieth century. Its original breeding range stretched from south-east Europe and Turkey to India and China. From the 1930s onwards it expanded rapidly to the north-west, first reached Germany in 1943 and within a few decades had colonised virtually the whole of Central Europe, reaching Scandinavia and the British Isles. Dense human settlement, year-round food from farming and households and the bird's adaptability are seen as the main drivers of this expansion.

In the field the collared dove must be told apart in particular from the wood pigeon and the turtle dove. The wood pigeon is clearly larger and more powerfully built, shows a conspicuous white neck patch and broad white wing-bars in flight, and uses both forests and green spaces and settlements. The turtle dove is smaller and more delicate, carries a vivid rust-brown and black pattern on the upperwing and a narrow black-and-white striped neck patch, lives in semi-open farmland with hedges, copses and woodland edges and is today seriously threatened across Europe. The collared dove, by contrast, can be identified by its uniformly pale colouring, the black nape crescent and its close ties to human settlements.

The legal situation is not uniform. In Germany the Federal Hunting Act lists the collared dove as a quarry species, and the associated regulation assigns it an open season in the winter half of the year. The individual federal states can shorten this period or impose year-round protection, so that the species is effectively not hunted in some Laender. It is additionally classed as a European bird species and is strictly protected under the Federal Nature Conservation Act. In Austria the collared dove is similarly treated as quarry game under the regional hunting laws, with an open season in the winter half-year. In Switzerland it is regulated at cantonal level and only small numbers are taken. Before any session on doves, hunters should therefore always check the current rules of the federal state or canton, and identify their target carefully to avoid confusing the collared dove with the year-round protected stock dove or the seriously threatened turtle dove.