| Window | Dates | Days |
|---|---|---|
| Season | 01 NOV 2026 – 07 FEB 2027 | 99d |
As publishedNov. 1, 2026-Feb. 7, 2027 (statewide, private land)
Statewide season applies to private land; no rifles, muzzleloading rifles, handguns, or shot larger than No. 2 common shot allowed. Blank ammunition permitted for bird-dog training. Many individual AGFC Wildlife Management Areas carry different quail dates/bag limits than the statewide rule (examples found: Dec 1-31 with daily limit 4; a permit-only Dec 12-13 & Jan 9-10 hunt; Jan 1-31 with daily limit 4; some WMAs closed to quail entirely), so check the specific WMA before hunting public land. A secondary aggregator (Farmers Co-op) listed a Feb 28, 2027 end date, which conflicts with AGFC's own guidebook and quail page (Feb 7, 2027); AGFC's own dates are the ones shown above.
AGFC's own Strategic Quail Management Plan puts bobwhite in every Arkansas county, but density splits clearly along a highlands-versus-lowlands line: the Ozark and Ouachita mountain regions carry meaningfully higher populations than the Delta and Gulf Coastal Plain, thanks to long-term land-use stability and large contiguous U.S. Forest Service acreage in the highlands, a pattern the plan's own brood-survey data corroborates. Fort Chaffee WMA and Corps of Engineers land along the Arkansas, Petit Jean, and Fouche LaFave rivers hold the strongest local populations within that better half of the state.
AGFC's newly published 2025 Quail Program Monitoring Report, reflecting last year's spring/summer survey cycle, the most recent completed data available, and the current edition (superseding the prior 2024 report), puts adult- and chick-per-observer indices at or near all-time highs since record-keeping began in 2002. Site-level counts back that up without being uniformly rosy: spring whistling was up at 5 of 31 survey sites, flat at 7, and down at 8, mostly nominal pullbacks after a strong 2024 except at Camp Robinson WMA, the one site reading as a genuine multi-year decline. Fall covey counts were stable at 11 of 14 sites, up at 2 (Fort Chaffee, Little Bayou), and down at just 1 (Sylamore, read as normal year-to-year variation). Sylamore, Stone Prairie, and Little Bayou now sit above AGFC's own density threshold for opening or liberalizing hunting access, and several WMAs added or expanded quail hunting for the first time in 2025 without hurting those populations.
A genuine multi-decade statewide population high, per AGFC's current 2025 Quail Program Monitoring Report, the most recent completed survey cycle available.
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