Utah

Utah's most widely distributed upland species split into different range shapes depending on habitat. Chukar is self-sustaining across nearly all of the state's steep, rocky, semi-arid country, densest in the West Desert's island mountain ranges of Tooele and Juab counties, Deep Creek, Silver Island, and Stansbury among them, with a second population center in Carbon and Emery counties. Gray partridge carries a statewide season on paper, but its real range sits at the southern edge of the species' continental range and holds to the north, mostly private land in eastern Box Elder County and northern Cache County. Dusky grouse occupies forested habitat throughout the state, including isolated high-elevation pockets, such as the Stansbury and Oquirrh Mountains, disconnected from the main Wasatch-Uinta forest belt; ruffed grouse is the narrower of the two, confined to the Cache, Wasatch, and Uinta Mountains, since Utah marks the southern edge of that species' range. Band-tailed pigeon is open statewide. White-tailed ptarmigan is a single, deliberately introduced population confined to the Uinta Mountains high country above timberline, descended from Colorado stock released there in 1976.

Utah's two quail species occupy opposite corners of the state. Gambel's quail is native to the hot desert brush of the extreme southwest, Washington County around St. George and the Beaver Dam Mountains, tied closely to the Virgin River, with a small disjunct population along the Colorado River near Moab. California quail, introduced in the late 1800s, is most common along the urban Wasatch Front and in the Uinta Basin in the state's north. Ring-necked pheasant hunting layers a statewide put-and-take stocking program over a real, if diminished, wild population whose core sits in the Cache Valley and eastern Box Elder and western Weber counties, with a second wild pocket in the Uintah Basin; stocking is not used to restore that wild population and exists purely to create hunting opportunity elsewhere. Greater sage-grouse and Columbian sharp-tailed grouse are both limited-entry permit hunts rather than general seasons: sage-grouse is open only in four named units, Diamond/Blue Mountain, Parker Mountain, Rich County, and West Box Elder County, and sharp-tailed grouse only in two, northeastern Box Elder County and Cache County, both largely private land.