Red-billed chough

The red-billed chough, Cornish chough or simply chough (/ˈtʃʌf/ CHUF; Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) is a bird in the crow family, one of only two species in the genus Pyrrhocorax. Its eight subspecies breed on mountains and coastal cliffs from the western coasts of Ireland and Britain east through southern Europe, North Africa and Middle East to Central Asia, India and China.

This bird has glossy black plumage, a long curved red bill, red legs, and a loud, ringing call. It has a buoyant acrobatic flight with widely spread primaries. The red-billed chough pairs for life and displays fidelity to its breeding site, which is usually a cave or crevice in a cliff face. It builds a wool-lined stick nest and lays three eggs. It feeds, often in flocks, on short grazed grassland, taking mainly invertebrate prey.

Although it is subject to predation and parasitism, the main threat to this species is changes in agricultural practices, which have led to population decline, some local extinction and range fragmentation in Europe; however, it is not threatened globally. The red-billed chough, which derived its common name 'chough' from the jackdaw, was formerly associated with fire-raising, and has links with Saint Thomas Becket and Cornwall.

The red-billed chough was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae as Upupa pyrrhocorax. It was moved to its current genus, Pyrrhocorax, by Marmaduke Tunstall in his 1771 Ornithologia Britannica. The genus name is derived from Greek πυρρός (pyrrhos), "flame-coloured", and κόραξ (korax), "raven". The only other member of the genus is the Alpine chough Pyrrhocorax graculus; hybrids with Alpine chough are known.

Traditionally, the closest relatives of the choughs have been thought to be the typical crows Corvus and the jackdaws Coloeus, but more recent genetic studies have suggested the choughs are basal to a group of Asian jay genera (Crypsirina, Dendrocitta, Platysmurus, Temnurus), or most recently, basal in the entire Corvidae.

There are eight extant subspecies, although differences between them are slight.

The small population in Brittany has often been included with British and Irish birds in the nominate subspecies P. p. pyrrhocorax, but is now included with other mainland Western European populations in P. p. erythroramphos; in some aspects it is intermediate between the two subspecies.

Detailed analysis of call similarity suggests that the Asiatic and Ethiopian races diverged from the western subspecies early in evolutionary history, and that Italian red-billed choughs are more closely allied to the North African subspecies than to those of the rest of Europe.