Chuffed About Choughs

Aditi Patil

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It took us over 72 hours of back and forth, correcting and wronging each other and nit-picking Prem ji’s brain to finally remember that the yellow-billed chough is called Kiang and red-billed Chough Kwa in Lahauli. They belong to the family of corvids or crows.

Tasked with carrying out research for Lahaul’s Forest Division, we would spot and admire the yellow-billed chough (Kiang) every day from our work spot—our favourite table next to the windows of the Climber’s Café, which overlooked the Bhaga river that sprinted through Keylong, quite unlike our research progress.

Keylong, the district headquarters of Lahaul and Spiti, Himachal Pradesh is a small town of 1,150 people. And Prem ji knows everything about all of them, making him the most important person there. We suspected the choughs were part of his intelligence network. They’d swoop in, spend ten minutes on a roof, and suddenly Prem ji knew which cousin was visiting from Kullu. His personal mission was to educate us, earnest nature conservation researchers, on the finer points of local culture. And so we drank the local brewed “chaang” and played cards with him every night. Very cultural of us!

During the day, as nosy, amateur birders, we spent hours analysing bird behaviour. Choughs were unlike any other bird we had seen. The yellow-billed ones dived down dizzying heights, using the wind as their surf board. Aeronautical experts, they glided seamlessly with the wind flow, not needing to flutter their wings once.

Pigeons on the other hand, (Swansi in Lahauli as informed by Premji) gasped as a sudden blade of wind caught them unaware mid-flight. After a constant flapping and fluttering of winds, just enough balance was achieved to sneak under a thatched roof.

The choughs smirked at the sight of this from their high tower of reign.

“It’s pronounced chuff,” Manya announced to the entire café. Not with the remotest intent to educate the Delhi–Haryana tourists inhaling “pahaado-wali-maggi” but because her default volume setting is “railway station announcement”. Scientific taxonomy followed.

“Chuff?”

“Chuff.”

“And not chugh?”

“Not chugh.”

Manya then proceeded to read aloud a paragraph she found in The Guardian.

According to Kentish legend, the red-billed chough obtained its bright red beak and legs by wading in the blood of Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in Canterbury cathedral by four knights from Henry II’s household.

Unshaken, sipping on his tea, Prem ji countered with a less-horrifying lore from Lahaul: “When they fly over your farm, it means the harvest is going to be bountiful. But some associate it with impending death.” Lahauli culture spans over a dramatic range.

Manya continued reading the British article.

The species vanished from England, mostly because of changing farming practices, until three birds took up residence on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall in 2001. Since then, concerted efforts to restore suitable beetle-rich habitat have helped numbers rise to 200 birds in Cornwall, with a record 113 chicks fledging in 2023. Choughs have also been successfully restored to Jersey.

The café tourists retaliated to this ornithological knowledge by playing an IPL match on their phones at full blast. The batsman from the “Chennai something” team had apparently “hit a sixer so hard that the ball orbited the earth before returning to Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium.”

My upper body, touched by this moving commentary of sportsmanship, leaned a hundred centimetres further outside the window.

Our choughs here in Lahaul didn’t care for a “beetle-rich habitat”. We’ve seen them eat insects, worms, grubs, eggs of other birds, green vegetables, berries, barley, and once, an entire French fry stolen from a biker’s plate. Our choughs are smart. I’d watch an IPL match between choughs and black kites. Or perhaps choughs and golden eagles.

Birding is a slow activity. But once you’re into it, it’s easy to get lost in it and forget that your coffee might go cold, or that your actual work of calculating the “carrying-capacity of Chandratal Lake” might get delayed, resulting into hundreds of selfie-obsessed tourists flocking into a lake at 4,000 metres above sea level demanding a boat-ride and Maggi on the boat.

The next day we found ourselves hopping into one of the Forest Department’s vehicles enroute to Shinkula Top which sits at an elevation of 5,091 meters. Guess who was there before us?

“The yellow-billed chugh! I mean chough! Sorry chuff! Kiang!” exclaimed Manya, as she spotted a clever one encircling the Indian Army Base. She likes to spot birds loudly so the birds also know she’s spotted them.

“Kiang correct!” Prem ji beamed a proud smile from the driver’s seat. He loved driving in the mountains almost as much as correcting us.

The Forest Department Officers and the Indian Army Officers were in Shinkula that day to supervise a road construction which the Border Roads Organization (BRO) was building. We liked the BRO.

At Shinkula, we stumbled upon a Netflix shoot of Operation Safed Sagar. Prem ji insisted we go and watch the actors act. We went and saw the actors act. But our camera went back to focus on the chough.

Bloody borderless birds, I thought to myself.

“Bloody borderless birds”, Manya said aloud, as she focussed our humble little camera on an inky spot on the snowscape that is Shinkula.

Another one landed on a BRO truck and stared at us like a customs officer with questions. We saw them all along our drive back to Keylong, ebony companions of the cold whiteness.

Like many other birds, choughs had learnt that food is around human habitations. The problem with human habitations is humans. We concluded this when we reached Chandratal Lake for our eco-tourism study. It is a high-altitude lake at about 4,300 meters above sea level. There is no electricity. But humans who come there are ready to pay for it. And so generators were being hauled up by camping companies on land that is suitable only for frolicking marmots. Our friends, the choughs, look down upon this misery from the skies, attempting to find some basic sense but only finding bits of potato chips lodged in delicate alpine grasses. Perhaps tomorrow sheep herded by the Gaddis will eat the grass but today the chips belong to the choughs and they make a dive for it. The choughs scouted for chips, while Manya wondered aloud whether sheep might eat them. The camp owner told us yes, they do, and yes, they get sick. The nearest vet? 115 km away.

The camp owners weren’t happy with tourists causing a mess either. Neither was the Forest Department. The tourists were not happy with the lack of network. Nobody was fully content. Except the choughs. Night fell, temperatures dipped and skies became the colour of the choughs. A white band stood out—the Milky Way! Cosmic science followed.

“You know, this is not how it is right now, right?”

“???”

“This isn’t what it actually must be, right now, at this point in time, because this light travelled long ago and what we are seeing now is the past.”

“Ah yes, but more or less, the Milky Way appears pretty much the same everyday.”

Possibly straining one’s neck to look up the Milky Way, strained one’s brains too.

That night we slept under four thick blankets and woke up to a sunny summer day. The next morning, the choughs followed us along the Gaddi grazing route. We passed a tourist drinking lake water on all fours, a group dancing to loud music, and another cooking Maggi! The choughs circled overhead like black-suited wedding guests at a reception they hadn’t been invited to, judging everyone’s table manners. If they could cross their wings, they would.

A rough ride back to Keylong and a day later, we find ourselves back by the window in Climber’s Café. It was windy and drizzling. I closed the window, dug out an extra layer from my bag and snuggled in. Manya ordered another round of hot coffee. The café dog was fluffed up on the sofa. The cook made ginger tea for himself and lit the room heater. Only one creature was up and about, flying through the rain, grinning at our closed window—the mighty chough!

“I’m slashing the number of tents in Chandratal down to 100.”

“Cheers!” I said.

“Cheers!” barked the dog.

“Cheers!” said the cook.

“Chuff!” chirped the chough.

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Aditi Patil is a nature conservationist and the author of Patriarchy and the Pangolin (MPhil, University of Cambridge). She co-founded Conservation indica and currently works in the grasslands of Gujarat and the cold desert of Lahaul, Himachal Pradesh. She doesn’t write often, only when fieldwork turns into a story. When not chasing data, she befriends stray cats and documents the mischief of birds.

Instagram: @aditi_patil; LinkedIn: Aditi Patil

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Featured photo: Red-billed Chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) & Yellow-billed Chough (Pyrrhocorax graculus) captured at Borit, Gojal, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, by Imran Shah (Wikimedia Commons)