Where to see chough in the UK

How to find chough

The useful thing about choughs is that being in the right place is nearly the whole job. They occur on a handful of western coasts — Cornwall, Pembrokeshire and the Llŷn, Islay and the west of Scotland, plus Ireland — and essentially nowhere else in Britain. If you are on a suitable clifftop in those areas, your odds are good; if you are anywhere else, they are zero.

The call names the bird. It is a ringing, explosive *chee-ow*, harder and more musical than a jackdaw's, and it carries along a cliff face well before you spot anything. Learning that one sound is worth more than any amount of scanning.

In flight they are unmistakable once you know what to look for: broad wings with deeply fingered tips, a squared tail, and a habit of tumbling and diving along the updraught for no obvious reason other than that they can. The red bill and legs are diagnostic but you often won't see the colour at distance or against the light.

They feed on short, grazed clifftop turf, probing for invertebrates, so scan the grassy slope above the cliff rather than the rock face itself.

The Cornish population is the conservation story — extinct in the county for decades, recolonised naturally in 2001, and now slowly spreading. Local groups monitor the nests closely, so if you find one, keep your distance and don't broadcast the location.