La turtledove, a species of very important hunting tradition throughout the Mediterranean, is under the magnifying glass in Europe and Italy. A recent letter from the Ministry of Ecological Transition to the Italian Regions has asked for the suspension of hunting and the only way to avoid it is the approval of the National Management Plan, stopped in the State-Regions Conference. Hunting Federation it promoted the reopening of the Technical Roundtable for the approval of the Plan, and at the same time approved a research project that fills a gap in the knowledge of the biology of the species.
THEFaunistic and Agro-Environmental Studies and Research Office Federcaccia has thus promoted a research on the turtledove Streptopelia turtur, which will be conducted under the scientific coordination ofUniversity of Pisa with a project that will start as early as this nesting season. The aim is to learn about reproductive success in Italy, starting this year with an experimental program in some sample areas of Tuscany. This data is particularly important for the international project for the adaptive management of the collection of the species (AHM Adaptive Harvest Management) to allow to estimate the population of turtledoves present at the end of the breeding season, that is the adults plus the young of the year and consequently to estimate the number of animals that can be killed in the different countries where the species is huntable.
A data missing to date not only in Italy but throughout Central-Eastern Europe, while studies of this type are available for the Western population, in particular carried out in France, Spain and Portugal. This research will also give a general contribution to the knowledge of the turtle dove, evaluated in decline in various countries of its nesting area, while in Italy it is judged to be stable. The results will also be compared with what emerged from the collection of wings for an overall evaluation of the reproductive potential of the species. Federcaccia has thus signed a new step forward for the conservation of Italian and Mediterranean species and hunting traditions with a concrete action.