Wyoming

Chukar and gray partridge share Wyoming's densest population, the Bighorn Basin and the country east of the Bighorn Mountains, the historic core of both species' original introduction to the state; beyond that shared stronghold, chukar has its own separate population near Flaming Gorge Reservoir in the southwest and a scattered presence around Jackson Hole and Star Valley in the northwest, while gray partridge has its own separate populations near Kemmerer in the southwest and along the North Platte River near Huntley in the southeast. A further cluster near Torrington, Wheatland, and Rawlins sees partridge only during occasional good-year population irruptions, not as a standing range. Dusky and ruffed grouse both display individually in rugged terrain that doesn't lend itself to standard survey routes, so neither has a mapped statewide distribution, but both concentrate in the same forested mountain clusters: the Bridger-Teton and Shoshone National Forests in the northwest, the Bighorn National Forest in north-central Wyoming, and, for ruffed grouse specifically, the Black Hills in the far northeast; dusky grouse also extends more thinly across the mountain ranges of southeastern and southwestern Wyoming.

Ring-necked pheasant hunting in Wyoming is a put-and-take program built around named Wildlife Habitat Management Areas that the state stocks through the season rather than a wild population: the core sits in the southeastern grain belt of Goshen, Platte, and Laramie counties, anchored by Springer Wildlife Habitat Management Area, the state's marquee stocked site, with further stocked sites in the Bighorn Basin, central Wyoming, and Sheridan and Johnson counties. Greater sage-grouse hunting is tightly limited to one of four regulatory hunt areas, which covers most, but not all, of the state's highest-density core habitat, including parts of the Bighorn Basin and the south-central and southwest mountains; a real, substantial population in the Thunder Basin and Powder River Basin of northeastern Wyoming falls entirely within a closed hunt area. Sharp-tailed grouse hunting is restricted to the portion of the state east of the Continental Divide, which also happens to be a genuine subspecies boundary: the legally hunted population is Plains sharp-tailed grouse, concentrated near Wheatland in the southeast and in the Bighorn foothills and Powder River Basin in the northeast, while Columbian sharp-tailed grouse west of the Divide, including a real population of several hundred birds in the Little Snake River drainage of south-central Wyoming and a small population in Grand Teton National Park, remains closed to hunting entirely.

---