During the breeding season calling males attract challengers, and decoys were used to trap these birds especially for fighting.

The grey francolin was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[2] Gmelin based his description on "Le perdix de Pondichéry" that had been described in 1782 by the French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat in his Voyage aux Indes orientales et a la Chine.

Subspecies mecranensis is palest and found in arid North-Western India, Eastern Pakistan and Southern Iran.

The nominate race in the southern peninsula of India has populations with a darker rufous throat, supercilium and is richer brown.

They are weak fliers and fly short distances, escaping into undergrowth after a few spurts of flight.

[27][28][29][30][31] They are hunted in much of their range using low nets and easily caught using calling decoy birds.

[20] Several authors have described the running of the birds as being particularly graceful: They run very swiftly and gracefully; they seem to glide rather than run, and the native lover can pay no higher compliment to his mistress than to liken her gait to that of the Partridge.John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling's father, wrote of this and other partridges such as the chukar partridge: The creature follows its master with a rapid and pretty gait that suggests a graceful girl tripping along with a full skirt well held up.

In poetry, too, the partridge is associated with the moon, and, like the lotus, is supposed to be perpetually longing for it, while the chikore is said to eat fire.