Delaware

Pheasant, chukar, and gray (Hungarian) partridge hunting in Delaware is entirely put-and-take. Pheasant is stocked onto public land by the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC), males only, with independent hunting-press sourcing converging on four wildlife areas as the state's top public destinations: Cedar Swamp Wildlife Area in New Castle County, Norman G. Wilder and Milford Neck Wildlife Areas in Kent County, and Assawoman Wildlife Area in Sussex County. Chukar and gray partridge share that same season by statute but have no wild population and no defined public release program; both are taken only from birds released under individual private permits, with no aggregate record of where those releases cluster. All three run from the Monday immediately preceding Thanksgiving through the last day of February.

Northern bobwhite quail is a different case. Hunting wild quail is illegal in Delaware, so the legal season takes only pen-raised and released birds, on the same calendar as pheasant. That sits alongside a real, growing wild population that can't legally be hunted: prescribed-fire and invasive-removal habitat work begun in 2009 at Cedar Swamp Wildlife Area in southern New Castle County has grown the local wild population from a few dozen birds to roughly 800, and DNREC has since extended the same habitat work south along the Delaware Bayshore to just south of Milford, plus a newly detected population at Marshy Hope Wildlife Area in Sussex County.