Red-billed Chough

The red-billed chough, or Cornish chough, is a crow-family bird with glossy black plumage, a long curved red bill, red legs and a loud, ringing call. It pairs for life and shows fidelity to its breeding site, usually a cave or crevice in a cliff face. The plumage is velvet-black, green-glossed on the body. Its eight subspecies breed on mountains and coastal cliffs from western Ireland and Britain east through southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East to Central Asia, India and China (Wikipedia, general species account).

Its main habitat is high mountains, mainly 2,400–3,000 m in the Himalaya. It feeds, often in flocks, on short grazed grassland, taking mainly invertebrates. It builds a wool-lined stick nest and lays three to five eggs; chicks fledge 31–41 days after hatching. It is a non-migratory resident throughout its range, and its ringing chee-ow call is clearer and louder than the jackdaw's. SoIB 2023 rates it a Low conservation priority, a resident and altitudinal migrant of alpine and cold desert with a Moderate range of about 125,000 km² and insufficient data on trends (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).