Red Legged Jackdaws, Birds That Fly For Sheer Enjoyment

Sometimes people ask me what my favourite bird is. This is an extremely difficult question, it’s like asking which of my children I prefer. In fact, it’s worse than that, because I have no interest in having children, but plenty of interest in being a birder for the rest of my life. But let’s say there was a situation where I had to pick a top five list of birds, or the Earth would explode. I know that one bird would definitely be in that top five list, and that’s the red legged jackdaw, which is the direct English translation of their Irish name, cág casdearg. But their most common name is the chough, pronounced “chuff”.

Often times I’m a bit jealous of England, because they just seem to have more birds than us. They get to have a cool green woodpecker that we don’t have! It’s not fair! But maybe there is something that tips the balance of fairness a bit, and that’s that Ireland seems to have more choughs than England does. So at the risk of being quite juvenile and immature, na-na-na-na-na.

When I visit Courtmacsherry and the surrounding area, seeing, and hearing the choughs is always my top priority. While visiting in the Summer, I will always make at least one visit to the Coolim Cliffs.

While on the Coolim Cliffs last May, I heard my first choughs of the year, and recorded them:

https://xeno-canto.org/1142103

I got very emotional hearing one of my absolute favourite birds for the first time in the year, in fact I may have cried I was so happy. This sound takes me instantly to one of the happiest places possible. The two choughs flew over the Coolim Cliffs. There is something just magical about seeing these amazing birds flying over the Coolim Cliffs, cliffs which are just, insanely epic, that’s the only way to put it.

I’ve never been to the Cliffs Of Moher, and while I’d like to go some day, I honestly don’t think I’d enjoy it as much as the Coolim Cliffs. The reason is simple, these kind of places are best enjoyed alone, or at least with a very small group of people. And I’ll admit this presents a paradox. I’d love for more people to know the Coolim Cliffs, to feel it’s power to take them to much happier places, as it has for me for many years. But, if there was a lot of people there, the sounds of the waves, and the birds, would be drowned out by a cacophony of homo sapiens. We really are the loudest species, even louder than herring gulls!

I also caught these choughs in the distance. Sadly not as clear a recording as the first:

https://xeno-canto.org/1142937

Red legged jackdaw is a good name for these guys. Because what they have always sounded like to me, is like if a jackdaw had a more sci-fi quality to their call. This is the regular jackdaw we all know and love for comparison:

https://xeno-canto.org/1181946

The chough’s call is like a more alien sounding version of the jackdaw’s call. Isn’t that cool!

Just to give an understanding of why they are called “red legged jackdaws” in Irish, here’s a picture of a chough I took in the Winter of 2024.

In this photo I like to imagine that even the chough themselves is aware of how awesome their feet look. That red contrasts in a very lovely way with their jet black plumage.

So that’s why choughs look really cool, and sound really cool. This in itself is enough for me to look forward to hearing and seeing them time and time again. But there is something else about them that has frankly, captured my imagination, and it’s mainly this that places the chough in my top five spot in my hypothetical Earth exploding scenario. And that is, there is a lot of evidence that choughs fly simply because they are having the time of their lives.

https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/chough

The world is a nasty, mean, and frankly, genocidal place too often. And in order to stop going completely mad, we all need a way of unplugging from these horrible realities for a while, and focus on that which is beautiful, that which is amazing, and that which makes the heart soar. And for me, that is thinking about how over the cliffs of Ireland, and over our oceans, the choughs are up there, doing barrel rolls, and flying upside down. Living an amazing life, a life offered them by the fact that they are a pilot, and their own body is the aircraft. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed just thinking about the sheer majesty of what these birds experience.

Everything just feels so right with the world when I think of what it must be like to be up in the air, to live in a 3 dimensional paradise. And while I’m aware of Thomas Nagle’s “What Is It Like To Be A Bat” and know that I will never fully understand, I like to try and get as close as possible to understanding that sheer euphoria that the red legged jackdaws must be experiencing. The photos I’m about to show you I only rediscovered this minute, I take so many wildlife photos I lose track. These are two choughs flying over the ocean that I observed from the Coolim Cliffs, the bluest seas below them.

The red legged jackdaw. Living a life of wonder above the ocean. Birds often live a tough life. Food scarcity, predation, and let’s not forget how humanity’s domination of Planet Earth means that the lovely chough is an amber listed bird. So it is nice to know that for the red legged jackdaw it is not suffering and hardship all the time, sometimes, they are experiencing a state of happiness that we humans can never understand.

I left the Coolim Cliffs and headed back towards the house I stay at while in West Cork. The route back takes me on a nice scenic route with a lot more opportunities to see birds and wildlife, and it takes me, tides permitting, across Broad Strand, another place where I often see choughs. And, as I was leaving Broad Strand, what did I see but two more choughs. I went for both a photograph and a recording, never a good idea because the camera noise shows up in the recording, but I don’t get to encounter choughs as often as I would like, so my thinking is always, maximum number of photographs and recordings. Here’s the recording:

https://xeno-canto.org/1138685

And here’s the photo of these two aerobats.

This is one of my favourite photos of choughs, because it’s the only one where I captured the red of their beaks clearly while they were in flight.

As much as I like bird photography, the camera can be a double edged sword. When you are seeing something truly amazing, photographing it means it is preserved visually for, however long it is that photographs last, but at the same time it can be unfortunate that during a truly wonderful experience you are thinking “move the camera a bit left, increase the brightness, decrease zoom, no increase zoom!, no, it was right the first time put it back!” The irony of it is that with capturing the moment there is a danger of taking you out of the moment. Indeed, one of my fondest memories is of seeing a curlew suddenly take off out of the long grass right in front of me, so I was witnessing a curlew in flight only a meter away. I’m forever grateful to myself that I made the quick calculation that getting a good photo would be futile, I’d just be left with a blurry mess, and I just, enjoyed a beautiful moment that has now being committed to memory.

So that’s why, once I’d gotten my recording and photograph, I put down the camera and the recorder, and I just watched these two magnificent pilots, sailing on the air like kites. It was hypnotic, and joyful, and extremely peaceful. I’m getting very emotional thinking about it right now!

Part of what got me into birding was wondering, what is a day in the life like for a sentient mind that diverged from us about 300 million years ago? What is it like to lack the dexterity of the human hand, but to be the envy of the human species because your body is an aircraft? What is it like to know that you can take to the air, to see the cliffs, and the beaches, and the oceans, from way up high, whenever you want to? What is it like to be something else other than a human? These questions I believe are a big part of the reason why for me birding is not just a past-time, but one of the richest parts of my life.