California

California's upland hunting is anchored by three quail species sharing one statewide zone system, three zones that stagger season openings from late September to mid-October and run into the end of January. California quail, the state bird, is the most widespread, a common resident of low-to-middle elevation shrub, brush, and grassland habitat across nearly the entire state outside the desert interior. Gambel's quail replaces it there, confined to the Colorado and Mojave Desert country of the southeastern corner, along the lower Colorado River corridor and the Amargosa River/Death Valley area of the northern Mojave. Mountain quail holds the state's montane belt instead, the Coast Ranges, Klamath Mountains, Cascades, and Sierra Nevada, extending south into the Transverse and Peninsular ranges of southern California, with a few disjunct desert-mountain populations further east; it gets its own early-opening window in the mountain zone before folding into the general quail season. Chukar, introduced in 1932, is a fourth, separately-seasoned bird concentrated along the state's eastern edge, from the Modoc Plateau south through the Owens Valley and White Mountains into Death Valley, with a smaller population in the inner Coast Ranges between Pacheco Pass and the Tehachapi Mountains.

Ring-necked pheasant hunting has contracted sharply from its mid-20th-century peak but still concentrates in six historically defined regions, all agricultural valley country: the Sacramento Valley remains the most productive, followed by the Grasslands Ecological Area of the northern San Joaquin Valley, the Suisun Marsh, and the Klamath Basin and northeastern counties, with the Inland Deserts and South Coast regions holding the smallest remaining populations. The season runs roosters-only in November and December, with separate archery windows bracketing it in fall and winter. Ruffed grouse and sooty grouse share one combined season and bag limit across a wide legal hunting zone in northern California and the Sierra Nevada, but their real ranges differ: ruffed grouse is confined to the extreme northwest corner, Del Norte, Humboldt, Trinity, and Siskiyou counties, while sooty grouse fills out most of the rest of that zone, the North Coast Ranges and Klamath Mountains, the length of the Sierra Nevada, and disjunct populations in the Warner and White Mountains. Both run a single general season in September and October. White-tailed ptarmigan, introduced from Colorado stock in the early 1970s onto the Sierra crest near Mono County, has since expanded roughly fifty miles in each direction along the range into the Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon high country, on a short season in mid-September.