Idaho

Idaho's lowland upland hunting runs on a shared mid-September through end-of-January season for quail, chukar, and gray (Hungarian) partridge, with pheasant on its own separate calendar. California quail is the state's most abundant quail species by far, found along rivers and streams with brushy cover below 3,500 feet, concentrated in three areas: the Palouse Prairie in the north, the Magic Valley in south-central Idaho, and the Southwest region reaching to the Oregon border. It shares an aggregate bag with the much rarer northern bobwhite quail, introduced to the Boise Valley in the 1880s and never more than a thin, questionably self-sustaining population there, with a separate small overwintering presence in the Panhandle. Chukar's season is statewide, but the real population concentrates in the same three regions' steep, rocky canyon country along the Snake River and its tributaries, including Hells Canyon and the Owyhee Canyonlands. Gray partridge shares chukar's season and the same three regions but favors farmland edges adjacent to that canyon country rather than the canyon terrain itself. Ring-necked pheasant, roosters only, has its highest wild harvest in the Southwest, Magic Valley, and Southeast regions' irrigated agricultural valleys, with a youth-only season in early October ahead of the regular season, which opens in mid-October (nonresidents five days later than residents) and runs through the end of December; a stocking program releasing pen-raised birds at two dozen sites gives every region of the state a public pheasant-access point even where wild density is low.

Idaho's grouse hunting splits by habitat into three groups. Dusky, ruffed, and spruce grouse share a single aggregate bag and split into two regulatory areas: Area 1, the Panhandle counties plus the northern part of the Clearwater region, runs into the end of January, while Area 2, the rest of the state, closes at the end of December. Dusky grouse is the most widespread of the three, found in mountain ranges throughout the state, including several southern ranges where the other two are absent, and moves uphill into dense conifer stands for the winter. Ruffed grouse reaches its highest densities in the Panhandle and northern Clearwater region's moist, brushy creek-bottom habitat, with real but thinner populations extending into the mountains of central, eastern, and southeastern Idaho. Spruce grouse is the most range-restricted of the three, generally confined to dense conifer forest north of the Salmon and Payette river drainages, the southernmost edge of the species' entire North American range. Columbian sharp-tailed grouse and greater sage-grouse are both sagebrush-country specialists with much narrower legal seasons than their historical range would suggest: sharp-tailed grouse hunting is open only in a defined set of southeastern Idaho counties, with the rest of the state closed, including areas around Twin Falls, Owyhee, Cassia, and Minidoka counties in south-central Idaho where reintroduced populations exist but can't legally be hunted; sage-grouse hunting is confined to twelve named zones across the sagebrush country of southern and eastern Idaho, each requiring its own tag purchased in advance, with land outside those zones closed. The general sage-grouse season runs from mid-September through the end of October, with a much longer falconry season.