Red-billed choughs (pronounced “chuff”) are a member of the corvid family, listed as least concern globally but were extinct on Jersey for over 100 years. Thanks to the work of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and their partners, choughs have been reintroduced to the cliffs of Jersey, with over 80 birds flying free along the north coast. The reason for the chough’s local extinction on Jersey is a common threat many species face: habitat loss. For the choughs, this was the loss of grazed grasslands that were maintained by sheep farming. After changing agricultural practices in the late 1800s, the fields where sheep grazed were abandoned. Without the sheep to keep plant growth down, the fields became overrun with bracken, hindering the chough’s ability to forage. This led to the chough’s extinction in Jersey by 1900. The chough reintroduction project combines three pillars of species recovery: captive breeding & release, wild management, and habitat restoration.

On a beautifully sunny day we spent the afternoon at the chough release site on the north coast, overlooking the ocean. We made our way along the narrow cliff path to where Durrell maintains a supplementary feeding station for the wild choughs, and were just in time to observe their daily feed (almost like it was planned!). Zookeepers from the Jersey Zoo offer the choughs food in dishes that allow them to mimic their foraging behaviour in a large, open-ended aviary. We not only saw the choughs come down to feed, but also saw flocks of them cruising on the wind blowing up off the ocean. To my delight (but not the choughs’) we also saw a peregrine falcon soaring over the cliffs!

An unexpected species we saw at the release site was a herd of Manx Loaghtan sheep. The sheep were introduced as part of the habitat management project at the site, to graze and restore the foraging landscape the choughs rely on.