Bird of the Month: Chough

The Chough

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Come on, sir; here’s the place: stand still. How fearful

And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles…

William Shakespeare, from King Lear, Act IV, Scene VI

Shakespeare’s scene is set near Dover. Today British choughs are confined to western coasts.

There are 300 breeding UK pairs – half of them in Wales, with others in Jersey, Cornwall, Isle of Man, Islay, Jura and Colonsay – and more than that in Ireland; mostly in Donegal. My first sighting, a passing flock instantly distinguishable from jackdaws by broader wings and black density, was in the Welsh seaside town of New Quay. We soon found them on a coastal pasture, their favourite worm- and grub-rich feeding ground.

In Britain they are maritime birds – not tree perchers like other crows. A glimpse of the sea is usually required even if they are colonising inland cliffs or quarries. In Europe, they are mountain birds, familiar to skiers along with the yellow-billed Alpine chough. Another chough species has been seen at 20,000 feet, on Everest.

Choughs are the gentlest of crows, their courtship notably tender. The male presents food to the female, who quivers her wings like a nestling. They mate for life and flock when not breeding. Both gather tinder for the crevice nest, which the female builds and lines with wool and hair; never seaweed, however dry. And both feed the clutch of up to seven nestlings, almost always returning to the nest together.

Spectacular flyers, they invariably dive from a height to the rock face. Cornwall is their immemorial home, hence the ‘Cornish crow’. ‘Chow’ is how the Cornish pronounce ‘chough’, a name originally assigned to the jackdaw. But ‘chuff chuff’ is also a call – and ‘kwarr’ at the summation of an aerial arc.

The ‘Cornish crow’ is Cornwall’s emblem, surmounting the county’s coat of arms, and has a rich mythology, not least that King Arthur – Tintagel regarded as fabled Camelot – was reincarnated as a chough. But Canterbury also claims the bird. The red legs and bill, exceptional for crows, derived from its consoling the murdered Thomas à Becket; hence the bird’s inclusion in the city’s coat of arms.

The reduction of pasture by the mid-20th century meant only small western colonies held on. They were extinct in Cornwall for 30 years until a wild pair recolonised the Lizard from 2001. Birds of Conservation Concern (2019) has the chough listed ‘green’, as of ‘least concern’.

At Paradise Park near St Ives – founded in 1973 by former copywriter (the Milky Bar Kid) Mike Reynolds (1914-2007) and his wife Audrey (d 2017) – one can see choughs as part of the zoo’s conservation project Operation Chough.

Paradise Park choughs have been successfully released in Jersey via the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and, since December, introduced via the Wildwood Trust at Herne, near Canterbury.

It is hoped Kentish choughs will flourish in honour of St Thomas, even to the extent of recolonising Shakespeare Cliff near Dover.