14 ALPINE CHOUGH. 



The Alpine Chough, is not only sej)arated specifically from our 

 well-known Cornish Chough, but has been placed by Cuvier in a 

 separate genus, sixty-one genera from it; some real or fancied differ- 

 ence in the bealc being the reason assigned for this remarkable 

 distinction of two birds, so closely allied that it is almost difficult to 

 distinguish one from the other. The Alpine bird has a yellow 

 instead of a red beak, and is rather less than the Cornish species; 

 in other respects, in form and colqur, feet, nostrils, wings, and tail, 

 they are absolutely the same. In habit they are also identical, and 

 M. Teraminck mentions that in the high Alps he has often seen the 

 two species united together in large flocks. 



The Alpine Chough is common in the Alps, Pyrenees, and in 

 Greece. They inhabit the highest valleys of the Alps, in the neigh- 

 bourhood of regions covered with perpetual snow, from which, 

 Temminck observes, they never come down into the plains till all 

 nourishment fails them. 



They nest in the clefts of the most precipitous rocks, and of ruins 

 and towers in the villages of the highest mountains. They lay four 

 or five eggs — whitish with spots of a dirty yellow. 

 - They feed upon grain, insects, carrion, small crustaceans, berries, 

 worms, in fact everything they can get. 



Their moult is simple and ordinary; the sexes are scarcely to be 

 distinguished externally, and the young of the year are known by 

 having the beak and feet blackish, the old birds having those parts 

 covered with yellow or bright red. 



From a letter with which I have been favoured by Mr. Tuck, of 

 Wallington, Herts., containing some valuable remarks about the birds 

 which he observed near Pau, in the south-west of France, I extract 

 the following: — ''The Alpine Chough is often seen among the moun- 

 tains, sometimes in large flocks of nearly two hundred, as they were 

 at the end of March in the Vallee d' Ossau. They and the Red- 

 legged Crow seem about equally distributed there." 



This bird occurs frequently in Greece. The Count Von der 

 Miihle, in his "Beitraege zur Ornithologie Griechenlands," page 54, 

 says: — "The Alpine Chough is found in all the mountain range of 

 Greece, as well in Lacedemonia as in E.umelia; it is also found in Illyria, 

 where it abounds in the volcanic rocky caverns formed on the level 

 land. These caverns became the dwelling-place of incredible flocks 

 of Alpine Choughs, Pigeons, (Columba lima,') and Jackdaws. I 

 generally visited one of these caverns every morning, and when I 

 looked into it there arose such a noise from the mingled voices of 

 its various inhabitants, that I was positively deafened by it. These 



