West Beckham Old Allotments: Operation Turtle Dove

Written by Val Stubbs, Felbeck Trust Trustee

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A former allotment and daffodil field, West Beckham Old Allotments – known affectionately as WBOA by our volunteer crew – are owned by East and West Beckham Parish Council, and managed by Felbeck Trust under a long lease. When Felbeck Trust took on the site in 2019, we were faced with a field of dock plants and thistles, and it looked like a very daunting task to get this under control. Since then, however, there has been quite a transformation thanks to many hours of hard work by our team of volunteers and corporate volunteering days. The site is being restored to wildflower meadow, boundary hedges are being gapped up, laid and managed, and many native trees have been planted to create additional hedgerows and copses.

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The site is surrounded by tall traditional hedges – mostly Hawthorn, Blackthorn, Cherry and Dog Rose with veteran Oak boundary trees – and just two miles away from one of the last remaining breeding pairs of Turtle Dove on the Norfolk coast. Felbeck Trust contacted the RSPB, which assessed the site as suitable for its “Operation Turtle Dove” project – intended to reverse the decline of Turtle Dove, currently vulnerable to global extinction.

 

These beautiful birds are very particular about their breeding habitat, so we have carried out specific work to create a suitable environment:

• Nurturing tall thick hedges of thorny native species, with climbers such as Honeysuckle and Bryony – which create an impenetrable thicket for Turtle Doves to breed, safe from predators. We have planted a secondary hedge next to the existing tall thick hedge on the western boundary of the site, to further enhance this as a potential nesting site.

• Creating two ponds with shallow shelving edges to allow this short-legged species to reach the water. The first was dug over a couple of months by pairs of volunteers in 2020 during Covid-19 lockdown period where two people were permitted to meet outdoors, while the second was dug in a day by our corporate volunteers from Marsh Insurance – and filled the next day by Storm Babet. As Turtle Doves are grain-eaters, they require a water supply close to their feeding sites.

• Carrying out a programme of supplementary feeding with a special seed mix supplied by the RSPB. The provision of supplementary feed enables birds returning from Africa to get quickly into optimal breeding condition, in the face of the lack of agricultural weed seeds in our intensively farmed area, giving them a better chance of successful breeding, as well as allowing them to feed up before they make their migratory trip back in the autumn.

• Closing off public access to the western half of the site during the Turtle Dove breeding season, as they are very sensitive to disturbance. In addition, we exclude dogs from the whole site during the April-September period. The rest of the year the whole site is accessible to all, including dogs on leads, allowing us to balance the needs of rare wildlife with that of the local community.

• In addition, we have joined with several landowners in the Kelling and Salthouse areas – where breeding Turtle Doves are hanging on - to share knowledge and support each other's efforts.

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We are thrilled to be able to report that there were two credible sightings of a Turtle Dove at West Beckham Old Allotments in 2025. It is wonderful to see that our efforts have paid off. We hope that this bird will return next year and who knows, maybe we will see breeding at WBOA. Ed Tooth, the RSPB’s Conservation Officer for The Wash and North Norfolk Coast, the Operation Turtle Dove Officer for our area, responded enthusiastically to the report of our sightings: “It's absolutely brilliant you have had some TD sightings at West Beckam! Great news.” In nature conservation, it’s always important to be prepared to adapt: both sightings were near the Lockdown Pond, rather than at the original feeding site, so we have begun scattering seed in both locations. As to the future, we will continue our supplementary feeding programme and may consider stripping some areas of turf to create arable weed patches. We also hope to encourage nearby farmers to leave suitable field margins to allow Turtle Doves to forage for arable weed seeds on neighbouring land.