Alaska

Alaska hunts three ptarmigan species, willow (the state bird), rock, and white-tailed, under one shared regulatory table with matching unit-by-unit season and bag structure; season length varies hugely by game management unit, opening as early as August 1 in the southcentral units and running as late as June in the far northern and western ones, with most units falling somewhere between an August opener and a March or April close. Willow ptarmigan is the most widespread of the three, occupying willow-thicket and tundra habitat almost everywhere except the Interior's forested river valleys, Southeast Alaska's closed-canopy woods, and the Aleutians west of Unimak Island, with its heaviest use on the Seward Peninsula, through the Alaska Range, and across Southcentral Alaska including the Kenai Peninsula. Rock ptarmigan covers similar ground, from the Brooks Range south through Southeast Alaska, and is the only one of the three found on the Aleutian Islands, where a distinct subspecies occupies lower-elevation coastal terrain rather than mountain tundra; its heaviest use runs through the Kenai Peninsula, the Chugach Mountains and Alaska Range, and the eastern Interior near Tok. White-tailed ptarmigan is far more restricted, confined to the high alpine terrain of Southcentral Alaska, the Chugach, Kenai, and Talkeetna ranges, with a smaller population in the mountains around Juneau and along the Chilkat Pass corridor in the southeast.

Alaska's four grouse species, ruffed, sharp-tailed, sooty, and spruce, are likewise regulated together under one shared table on the same roughly August-through-spring structure; Units 8 and 10 (Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula/Aleutians) have no open grouse season at all. Spruce grouse is the most broadly distributed, found in nearly every sizable patch of boreal forest statewide, Interior white spruce and birch woods, Southcentral, and the Sitka spruce and hemlock forests of Southeast Alaska. Sharp-tailed and ruffed grouse are both Interior birds at their core: sharp-tailed grouse is confined to the Yukon, Tanana, Koyukuk, Kuskokwim, and Copper river valleys, with its heaviest use around Tok and Delta Junction, while ruffed grouse is native to that same country north of the Alaska Range plus one small native pocket along the lower Stikine and Taku rivers in the southeast, and also holds two successfully established transplant populations south of the Alaska Range, in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley and on the Kenai Peninsula. Sooty grouse, by contrast, is confined entirely to Southeast Alaska's coastal rainforest, present on nearly every island and cape between Haines and Ketchikan except Prince of Wales Island.