Colorado

Colorado's eastern plains carry four upland species. Ring-necked pheasant is the most widespread, running roosters-only from mid-November through the end of January (into early January west of a zone split line), concentrated in three regions: the South Platte River drainage of northeast Colorado (Yuma, Phillips, Sedgwick, Logan, Washington, and Morgan counties) is the core range, followed by an east-central pocket (southern Yuma, Kit Carson, Cheyenne, and Kiowa counties) and an extreme-southeast pocket in Baca and Prowers counties around Walsh and Stonington. Northern bobwhite and scaled quail share the same season and zone structure as pheasant and hold two of the same general areas: bobwhite in the extreme southeast and along the South Platte corridor near Sterling, scaled quail in that same southeast corner and, more broadly, the arid grassland and canyon country east of I-25 and south of U.S. 50. Greater prairie-chicken is the outlier of the four, confined to a much smaller range, the sandhill grasslands of northern and central Yuma County, extreme eastern Washington County, and extreme southern Phillips County, on a season running October through the end of January.

West of I-25, Colorado's mountain and Western Slope birds split along the Continental Divide. Dusky grouse occupies the forested high country almost wall to wall, aspen-sagebrush country on the Front Range/South Park side of the Divide and aspen-oakbrush-serviceberry mixes on the Western Slope (Grand Mesa, the Uncompahgre Plateau, the Flat Tops, and the San Juan Mountains), on a season running September into late November. White-tailed ptarmigan occupies alpine tundra above treeline throughout the mountains, split into a limited-permit San Juan Mountains population, genetically distinct from the rest of the state, and a broader northern population covering the Front Range, Park Range, Sawatch Range, and Elk Mountains, plus smaller pockets in the Flat Tops and Sangre de Cristo range, on a short mid-September season. Greater sage-grouse and Columbian sharp-tailed grouse are both limited-permit, single-region birds: sage-grouse to northwest Colorado, where North Park alone holds roughly a fifth of the statewide population and gets its own season, sharp-tailed grouse to a Moffat-Routt-Rio Blanco core with an active restoration effort extending it into Grand County. Chukar's real population sits in the canyons of west-central Colorado, Montrose, Delta, Mesa, and Garfield counties along the Colorado and Gunnison river drainages, with a smaller population in Montezuma County and an ongoing, not-yet-established attempt to build a population east of the Divide in the Poudre Canyon; its season runs statewide from September through November. Gambel's quail is a single-county outlier in the far southwest, a rare population in the desert canyon country around Cortez in Montezuma County, sharing bobwhite and scaled quail's season and zone structure despite the very different geography.