Alpine Chough

Pyrrhocorax graculus

I arrived in the Alps this morning after a restless night on the Eurostar (NOT designed for overnight travel); today has been lovely nonetheless. I'm skiing with my parents, and today was incredibly low-stress for a changeover day (which can be rather manic: moving in to the flat, unpacking and settling in, getting ski pass/skis...); it all just went very smoothly today which is unusual.

We went out for a fairly brief ski this afternoon (it was snowing quite hard, and visibility was very poor) which was fun, and it feels so liberating to be back on skis again.
We got a baguette for lunch, and used the hard ends of it to tempt the alpine choughs down onto the edge of our balcony: they were surprisingly tricky to capture, mostly because of the dramatically contrasty scene with uniformly lit background snow, and little to light the side of the choughs closest to me... The snow in the sky, and thick cloud didn't help the lighting situation.

This is the most satisfying of the bunch in terms of showing the chough (and the snow it had kicked up in its scuffle for the bread!): they have lovely bright yellow beaks, and vivid orange legs. They're corvids so closely related to crows, magpies, and their kin... I got funnier pictures of them snatching the bread on the wing, and also just popping their heads up over the snow to take the bread whilst remaining mostly hidden. They are cute birds and fun to watch and photograph in the air: they wheel on thermals, and fly together in large groups, all the while chirruping with their characteristic "chough, chough" call.

p.s. I've just back blipped my 300th blip: please take a look if you have a mo! It's a picture I've been trying to capture for a while now, so it feels nice to have caught it on a significant blip day.