Michigan · UplandRing-necked pheasant

Michigan regulates pheasant under three named zones plus a stacked December unit, and the zone structure itself tracks a real east-west population split. Zone 1 (Upper Peninsula) is a small, marginal pheasant management unit covering all of Menominee County and portions of Delta, Dickinson, Iron, and Marquette counties, open only Oct. 10-31 with no December extension. Zones 2 and 3 (the entire Lower Peninsula) hold the state's real wild pheasant range and are open Oct. 20-Nov. 14; independent hunting-press sourcing (echoing MI DNR's own Pheasant/Quail Cooperators survey framing) narrows the best hunting specifically to 'south-central to mid-Michigan and into the Thumb.' The December pheasant management unit is legally defined as the entirety of Zone 3 (southern Lower Peninsula) and is where MI DNR supplements the wild population with 13 named put-and-take release sites for the Dec. 1-Jan. 1 season. A separate federal-state habitat program, the Southern Michigan Pheasant and Monarch Recovery SAFE project (2018, USDA/MI DNR), covers this same southern-LP-plus-Thumb geography with a funded 41-county southern Lower Peninsula eligible area (plus 5 Upper Peninsula counties).