Red-billed choughs return to south-east England after 200 years

Red-billed choughs (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) have been reintroduced near the iconic white cliffs of Dover in south-east England after a 200-year absence.

Choughs are charismatic corvids related to crows and jackdaws, with a bright red bill, red legs and a distinctive call. “I like to describe them to the public as blackbirds on steroids because they’re a lot bigger and they’ve got this wonderful bright red bill,” says Elizabeth Corry at Wildwood Trust, a local conservation charity. However, choughs have been in decline for many decades owing to the intensification of farming and historic persecution.

According to the most recent data from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, there are an estimated 394 breeding pairs in the UK, with populations in Cornwall, north Wales and the Isle of Man.

Corry and Laura Gardner head up the reintroduction project, a joint effort between the Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust. The choughs are creche-reared, a form of hand-rearing that habituates them to humans without causing detrimental imprinting. “We have a black glove and tweezers to mimic the chough [mother’s] head when we’re feeding them,” says Gardner. “We play audio playback to them when there’s a begging call from the nest when they want food.”

The team is using three different tracking devices to monitor the birds, including “daily diary” tags that the choughs wear like a backpack. These incorporate an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a barometric pressure sensor. “What’s awesome about it is it’s super fine-scale data. So you can zoom right in and you can see each individual behaviour,” says Jess Stevens, another team member at Wildwood Trust.

The tags will provide useful insights into survival rates, how far the choughs are travelling and what nesting sites they may be utilising.

The team hopes to release 30 to 50 individuals over five years, but some losses are expected from predation. The aim is to establish a population of 15 breeding pairs in 10 years. If successful, the birds could eventually meet up and breed with choughs from Cornwall in south-west England. “It’s about trying to help the whole of the UK population of choughs,” says Corry.