Michigan

Michigan pheasant hunting splits three ways. The Upper Peninsula zone, covering Menominee County and parts of Delta, Dickinson, Iron, and Marquette Counties, is a small, marginal population with a short season in October. The Lower Peninsula's two zones hold the state's real wild pheasant range, open from late October through mid-November, with hunting-press and cooperator-survey sourcing narrowing the best of it to south-central Michigan and the Thumb; healthy pheasant habitat generally needs large, connected grassland with under 10 percent forest cover in the surrounding landscape. The southern Lower Peninsula zone alone also carries a second season running from early December into the start of January, built around thirteen named public release sites where the state supplements the wild population with stocked birds. Northern bobwhite quail is far more restricted: hunting is open in only 26 named counties clustered in south-central and southeastern Lower Peninsula farmland, from mid-October through mid-November, with every other Michigan county, including the entire Upper Peninsula, closed to quail hunting regardless of local population.

Ruffed grouse is open statewide, but the bag limit itself tracks a real north-south density split, a higher limit in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula, where the state's core forested grouse range and its dedicated grouse-habitat sites sit, and a lower limit in the agricultural, lower-forest-cover southern Lower Peninsula. The season runs from mid-September through mid-November, pauses, then resumes for most of December, running into the start of January. Sharp-tailed grouse hunting is legally open across the entire Upper Peninsula, but the real population has contracted since the early 1990s to the eastern Upper Peninsula specifically, centered on Chippewa and Schoolcraft Counties with smaller numbers in Mackinac, Alger, and Luce Counties; that season runs for three weeks in October.