Alpine chough
The Alpine chough is one of only two species in the genus Pyrrhocorax. Its two subspecies breed in high mountains from Spain eastwards through southern Europe and North Africa to Central Asia and Nepal. The bird has glossy black plumage, a yellow beak, red legs, and distinctive calls. It has a buoyant acrobatic flight with widely spread flight feathers.
About Alpine chough in brief
The Alpine chough is one of only two species in the genus Pyrrhocorax. Its two subspecies breed in high mountains from Spain eastwards through southern Europe and North Africa to Central Asia and Nepal. The bird has glossy black plumage, a yellow beak, red legs, and distinctive calls. It has a buoyant acrobatic flight with widely spread flight feathers. It builds a lined stick nest and lays three to five brown-blotched whitish eggs. It feeds, usually in flocks, on short grazed grassland, taking mainly invertebrate prey in summer and fruit in winter. Although it is subject to predation and parasitism, and changes in agricultural practices have caused local population declines, this widespread and abundant species is not threatened globally. Climate change may present a long-term threat, by shifting the necessary Alpine habitat to higher altitudes. The Australian white-winged chough, Corcorax melanorhamphos, despite its similar bill shape and black plumages, is only distantly related to the true choughs. The species epithet graculus is Latin for a jackdaw. The current binomial name of the Alpine Chough was formerly sometimes applied to the red-billed chough. The English word “chough” was originally an alternative onomatopoeic name for the jackdaws, Corvus monedula, based on its call.
The nominate subspecies of the Alpine Chough has a short yellow bill, dark brown irises, and red legs. The juvenile is duller than the adult with a dull yellow bill and brownish brown legs. It is slightly smaller than red- billed chough, at 37–39 centimetres length with a 12–14 cm tail and a 75–85 cm wingspan, but has a proportionally longer tail and shorter wings than its relative. The sexes are identical in appearance although the male averages slightly larger than the female. A Pleistocene form from Europe was similar to the extant subspecies, and is sometimes categorised as P. g. forsythi, but this has not been widely accepted and is usually treated as synonymous with digitatus. This is in accordance with Bergmann’s rule, which predicts that the largest birds should be 191–244 feet against 188–252 feet for P graculus, and it has stronger legs and unglossed grey plumage and a long red bill for P digitatus. P. digitatus averages larger than the nominate form, weighing 191–g–244 ft against 188 g–252 ft for P. graculus, but it has a longer red bill and it is stronger, according to Bergmann’s rule. It was first described by Linnaeus in the Systema Naturae in 1766, and moved to its current genus, PyrrhOCorax, by English ornithologist Marmaduke Tunstall.
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This page is based on the article Alpine chough published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
