Feathered Fridays - Alpine Chough

Vianney Bajart, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Pyrrhocorax graculus

Hey, guess what? I’m back! Didn’t expect that did you? But it’s another [early] Feathered Friday and this one is kind of special because I want to talk to you about a bird you don’t see in the UK. Nope. This one I have seen with my own eyes, swirling in small flocks over a beautiful North Italian town, their rippling trills filling the crisp mountain air. I mistook them for blackbirds at first, but no, this was in fact the Alpine Chough, a relative of the crow.

© Friedrich Haag / Wikimedia Commons (right)

At first glance, it is easy to see where the similarity to a blackbird lies. Both birds have all-black feathers, a longish tail, and a yellow bill, but that is where the similarity ends as the Alpine Chough, while only a few inches larger, can weigh 3-4 times more than a standard blackbird and with double the wingspan. They also have strikingly red legs and, as I mentioned, gather in flocks, very un-blackbirdlike behaviour. Their trilling calls are also mixed with slightly alien, staccato notes and phrases like a sci-fi laser.

They are year-round residents across a broad swathe of central Europe from the Balkans and the Mediterranean, through the Alps, to the Pyrenees and even the north-west tip of Africa. In winter, they are found closer to the coast or higher up the peaks. They most commonly frequent ski resorts, which is where I first saw them, scavenging almost tamely from tourists, but do descend to valley fields with other Choughs (with which they can also be confused). Their diet usually consists of berries, seeds, insects and other invertebrates, which they forage for in grassland. And this goes to feed up to 5 chicks annually, raised between May and July in a bulky cliff-side nest of stems and twigs. Just think was a noisy yet enchanting cloud of birds that will make in a few short years.

Facts taken from: eBird and the RSPB’s ‘Birds of Britain and Europe’ Guidebook by Rob Hume.

https://ebird.org/species/yebcho1?siteLanguage=en_GB

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0241302242/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1