Chukar

Chukars are not native to North America. They originate in the dry rocky country of southern Eurasia — from the eastern Mediterranean across the Middle East to western China — and were introduced into the United States starting in the 1930s. After decades of trial-and-error stocking, they took hold in the arid, broken country of the interior West and have been a self-sustaining game bird there ever since.

Chukar country is rough on purpose. They live on steep, rocky, south-facing slopes covered in cheatgrass and bunchgrass, often a thousand vertical feet above the nearest road. The standing joke among chukar hunters — that the first time you hunt chukars is for fun, every time after that is for revenge — is honest. They run uphill, they flush downhill, and they don't decoy.

Despite being non-native, chukars have become a fixture of western upland hunting. They thrive in country most native upland species can't or won't use, and because the rocky-slope habitat they prefer has limited commercial value, large areas of public BLM and USFS ground in Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Washington, and California carry strong wild populations.