ON THE WILD SIDE
BIRDS need access to water and food, especially in summer. Traditional bird baths aside, a water feature is something you can appreciate, and they can enjoy.
CORDLESS hedge trimmers make shaping greenery easy. This light Mac Allister model,
£63 from B&Q, has a
52cm double-sided blade for precise pruning.
Chough? Bless you! No, it’s a bird in the crow family. Pronounced “chuff”, it is superficially similar to the jackdaw and indeed shared a name with him for most of our history – they were only separated properly some
300 years ago.
They are very easy to tell apart when you get a good look, as the chough has red legs and a large, red curved beak.
They like steep sea cliffs, nesting deep in crags in rocks, or abandoned cliff-top buildings. There are about 600 or
700 choughs in Britain, with 300 or so on the Isle of Man. They are all crushed up on the western cliffs of the country, mostly in Wales. Part of the culture of Cornwall, they have been on the county’s coat of arms since the 1300s.
Despite this, they declined so much they were extinct in Cornwall for nearly 30 years.
They came back on their own after southern Welsh birds began returning to their old Cornish haunts in 2001. In 2002 a pair from Ireland was introduced and raised more than 50 chicks to help repopulation. Choughs eat insects from short grass and rely on land well-grazed by livestock. They can’t get their long beaks through thick vegetation to eat.
They also use livestock for
NOW verges and meadows have long grasses with seed heads, see how many species of grass there are. Notice all the shapes, sizes and colours. They are loved by bugs.
other things: dung attracts insects that choughs love, and they will stand on the back of sheep and pick ticks and other parasites from them.
It is possible for them to live into their late teens, and their only real natural predators in the UK are peregrine falcons and humans raiding their nests.
Guernsey folk believed that choughs were witches’ crows, who swore their allegiance to their wicked mistresses by wearing red stockings.
Although not creatures of pure evil, they are members of the crow family so are very intelligent and love to show off their acrobatic flying skills.
THE idyllic view of sheep grazing along the top of a steep sea cliff may not be an image we see very much any more in the UK, unless you are lucky like me and have access to the Welsh coast. There was one bird that completely relied on this landscape – the chough. With their numbers finally on the rise thanks to some very careful land management, let me introduce one of my favourite species.