Alpine Chough - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The Alpine Chough was first described as Corvus graculus by Linnaeus in the Systema Naturae in 1766. It was moved to its current genus, Pyrrhocorax, by English ornithologist Marmaduke Tunstall in his 1771 Ornithologia Britannica, along with the only other member of the genus, the Red-billed Chough, P. pyrrhocorax. The closest relatives of the choughs were formerly thought to be the typical crows, Corvus, especially the jackdaws in the subgenus Coloeus, but DNA and cytochrome b analysis shows that the genus Pyrrhocorax, along with the Ratchet-tailed Treepie (genus Temnurus), diverged early from the rest of the Corvidae.

The genus name is derived from Greek πύρρος (purrhos), "flame-coloured", and κόραξ (korax), "raven". The species epithet graculus is Latin for a jackdaw. The current binomial name of the Alpine Chough was formerly sometimes applied to the Red-billed Chough. The English word "chough" was originally an alternative onomatopoeic name for the Jackdaw, Corvus monedula, based on its call. The Red-billed Chough, formerly particularly common in Cornwall and known initially as the "Cornish Chough", eventually became just "Chough", the name transferring from one genus to another.

The Alpine Chough has two extant subspecies.

  • P. g. graculus, the nominate subspecies in Europe, north Africa, Turkey, the Caucusus and northern Iran.
  • P. g. digitatus, described by the German naturalists Wilhelm Hemprich and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg as P. alpinus var. digitatus in 1833, is larger and has stronger feet than the nominate race. It breeds in the rest of the depicted Asian range, mainly in the Himalayas.

Moravian palaeontologist Ferdinand Stoliczka separated the Himalayan population as a third subspecies, P. g. forsythi, but this has not been widely accepted and is usually treated as synonymous with digitatus. A Pleistocene form from Europe was similar to the extant subspecies, and is sometimes categorised as P. g. vetus.

The Australian White-winged Chough, Corcorax melanorhamphos, despite its similar bill shape and black plumage, is only distantly related to the true choughs.

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