Red-billed Chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax)

In the UK, the chough is restricted to parts of Cornwall, the north and west of Wales, the Gower Peninsula, the north coast of Northern Ireland and the south-west Scottish Islands (6). It was once so common in Cornwall that an alternative name for the species was 'Cornish chough', and it features on the Cornish coat of arms (4). This species suffered a long decline, but in recent decades numbers have been increasing; in 2002 it bred in Cornwall for the first time in England for 50 years (7). The chough has a patchy distribution in Europe, the Canary Islands, Ethiopia, North Africa, and across Asia reaching Siberia and China (5).

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