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Chukar partridge | Alectoris chukar
Aziatische steenpatrijs | Perdiz chukar
A bird of hot, bare stony slopes in the southern Balkans and the Aegean islands. You hear it before you see it: a calling cock on a boulder carries the length of a valley, and the moment binoculars go up it turns back into one more grey stone among stones. In western Europe the species turns up almost only as a released gamebird rather than a wild one, and in Spain and Italy it contributes to the confusion over the purity of red-legged partridge, even though it does not breed there itself.
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Voice
The name is the call: a series of hard chuck notes that accelerates into a rolling chuck-chuck-chukar-chukar, usually delivered from a boulder in the first hour after sunrise. On flushing, a sharp rising whit-oo. Rock partridge sounds more irregular and throatier and lacks this settled rhythm.
No freely licensed recording is available for this species yet.
Identification
Rounded grey-brown gamebird with coral-red bill, red eye-ring and red legs. Throat and cheeks cream to yellowish-white, ringed by an unbroken black gorget that is slightly broad and ragged along its lower edge. Crown and nape grey-brown with a vinous cast; a rufous ear patch sits inside the black eye-stripe. Flanks narrowly and closely barred, mainly black and white. Flight low, fast and brief, showing rusty tail sides.
Confusion species
The four Alectoris partridges part company on the throat and neck. Chukar has a cream throat, never pure white, and the black surround stays closed, broadening into a slightly ragged lower edge; crown and nape are grey-brown with a vinous cast and a rufous ear patch inside the black eye-stripe. Rock partridge has a pure white bib that runs further down onto the upper breast, edged by a narrow, unbroken, knife-sharp black line, with black at the base of the bill; crown and nape blue-grey, flank bars broader and more widely spaced. On red-legged partridge the line does not stay closed at all: it dissolves downwards into a broad field of black streaks and drops across the neck and upper breast, the crown is warm chestnut, and the flank bars carry chestnut as well as black and white. Barbary partridge has no black gorget, but a broad chestnut collar spangled with white spots around a blue-grey face, under a chestnut crown. Hybrids are the real problem in the field: releases of reared birds have let chukars and Chukar × Red-legged crosses run loose in Spain and Italy, and in Britain, where releasing chukars and hybrids was only outlawed in the early 1990s and rearing stock has never been kept entirely pure. Score such a bird — with a creamy rather than white throat, a gorget only half broken into streaks and flanks short of chestnut — as an uncertain Alectoris rather than a species. In the wild the ranges meet in north-east Greece and Bulgaria, where Chukar takes over from rock partridge, and elsewhere wherever gamebirds have been released.
Habitat
Dry stony slopes with phrygana and scattered thorny scrub, screes, rock outcrops and abandoned terrace walls; from sea level on the islands to well over two thousand metres in the Balkan ranges. Feeds on seeds, buds and greenery on open ground between the stones, and works old terraces and small stubble patches at village edges.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
In Europe from Bulgaria and north-east Greece eastwards across the Aegean islands, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus into Asia Minor and the Levant, and on through central Asia to China. West of that line rock partridge replaces it. Introduced far outside the natural range in North America, New Zealand and Hawaii, and released for shooting in Europe in Italy, Spain and Britain among others; the birds seen there from time to time go back to released stock and nowhere form a self-sustaining population.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Lesbos, Samos or Cape Sounion in April and May, just after sunrise. Take a path with a whole hillside in view and wait for the call; the birds walk uphill into the sun and cross the bare rock crowns for a moment. In the midday heat the chances are poor.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened, but European numbers are falling with hunting pressure, the abandonment of terrace farming and heavy grazing. In addition, reared birds of uncertain stock are released every year; these mix with wild Chukars and, in the contact zone in Bulgaria and northern Greece, with rock partridge.
Scientific name
Alectoris chukar | (Gray, 1830)
Gray described the species in 1830 as Perdix chukar; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Alectoris was introduced in 1829 by Kaup. Alectoris is Greek, from alektoris 'farmyard hen', from alektōr 'cockerel'. chukar imitates the call, by way of Hindi chakor; the word already occurs in Sanskrit. The specimen the first description was based on came from Srinagar, Kumaon.