Illinois

Illinois runs a single North/South zone framework for pheasant, gray (Hungarian) partridge, and quail, split along a line following U.S. 36, Illinois 29, and Illinois 9 from the Indiana border to the Mississippi River. The North Zone season runs from early November through the first week of January, and the South Zone stays open an extra week, through mid-January. Ring-necked pheasant, roosters only, is a common, permanent resident of northern and central Illinois and only a rare resident in the south, the same divide the zone line reflects; the state's Pheasant Initiative habitat-restoration program targets 46 counties across that same central, northern, and northwestern range. Gray partridge is hunted under the identical zone framework, but its real distribution has always been narrower: introduced through releases concentrated in the extreme northeastern counties in the early 1900s, it spread to occupy only about the northern quarter of the state by the 1960s and was never confirmed further south. The population has been declining for decades and no current range survey exists, so that remains the last documented boundary.

Northern bobwhite quail runs on the same zone calendar but the opposite geography: the population is highest in southern Illinois and lowest in the northeast, scarce in the north because of harsh winters and scarce in the east because of intensive row-crop farming, per the state's own species account. The state's Quail Initiative habitat-restoration program matches that pattern, enrolling land across 56 counties concentrated in the southern, western, and northwestern parts of the state.