The red-billed chough became extinct in Jersey around 1900. This exciting programme of habitat restoration on the Island’s coastline will once again provide these wonderful birds with a suitable home.Jersey’s north coast farmland is epitomised by small sloping fields running down to the cliffs’ edge. This area is often wild and can never have been easy to farm productively. However, in it’s heyday with un-intensive farming techniques and numerous hedges, shrubby areas between the fields and sheep grazed grasslands it must have been a haven for many species of farmland birds. Sadly, the area entered a steep decline in fortunes as these forms of farming became less profitable. The abandoned fields were quickly overrun by bracken and the dense stands of this fern offer little feeding opportunity for birds. Accordingly many species once common in these fields have declined and several have died out altogether. The yellowhammer Emberiza citronella was common between Grève de Lecq and Bouley Bay as recently as the 1980s. Now it is extinct here, its distinctive song a little bit of bread and no cheese no longer heard. The last pair was recorded in 2005. Similarly, turtle dove Streptopelia turtur, skylark Alauda arvensis and stonechat Saxicola rubecula have declined and may be lost soon while meadow pipit Anthus pratensis and linnet Carduelis cannabina, once widespread, now only thrive at only a handful of protected sites.
The highly charismatic red-billed chough Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax, with its striking long red bill and distinctive shrill call feeds on insects such as craneflies in farmland often close to the people and domestic animals that live there too. Historical numbers in Jersey are unknown, but, once found on several areas of the Island’s coastline, the chough became extinct by 1900. A similar pattern of extinction was recorded in all the other Channel Islands and the last attempted breeding may have been in Guernsey in 1929. Today the nearest colonies of chough to Jersey are in Brittany where there are around 50 pairs and in Cornwall, where the species is doing well since naturally recolonising in 2001, and on the Gower Peninsula and Pembrokeshire in west Wales. There are less than 500 pairs of this rare bird in all of the UK and the Isle of Man.
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