Connecticut

Connecticut's upland hunting is overwhelmingly put-and-take. Ring-necked pheasant is stocked ahead of each hunt day onto a network of public wildlife management areas and state forest blocks across all of the state's mainland counties except Fairfield, split by the state's wildlife agency into a western group, including Eversource Skiff Mountain Cooperative Wildlife Management Area, Simsbury Wildlife Management Area, and the Naugatuck State Forest West Block, and an eastern group, including Meadow Brook Wildlife Management Area, Mansfield Hollow Field Trial Area, and Bartlett Brook Wildlife Management Area, on a season running from mid-October through the end of February. Northern bobwhite quail, functionally extirpated as a wild bird in Connecticut, runs the same put-and-take model on a shorter standard season limited to the second half of October, extended to match pheasant's full run only at Nod Brook Wildlife Management Area and the Flaherty, Mansfield, and Sugarbrook Field Trial Areas. Chukar and gray (Hungarian) partridge are regulated jointly under one program with identical dates and no established wild population anywhere in the state; both exist only through private preserve releases and dog-training stock, with no public stocking geography to name.

Ruffed grouse is Connecticut's one genuinely wild upland bird, and its population concentrates in the northern third of the state, where more of the young-forest and shrubland habitat the species needs has survived; less than five percent of Connecticut's roughly 60-percent forest cover is in that successional stage. The season runs from mid-October through the end of November.