Missouri

Missouri's bobwhite quail season runs in two stages, a youth-only weekend in late October ahead of the general season, which opens in early November and runs into mid-January. The Missouri Department of Conservation tracks the bird through an August roadside survey broken into eight named zoogeographic regions covering nearly the entire state; quail are found across all of them, but the population consistently runs heaviest in the northern and western prairie and riverbreaks country and thins out toward the forested Ozark Plateau and its border counties to the south. Ring-necked pheasant, a roosters-only season sharing the same youth weekend and the same November-to-mid-January general season, has a much narrower range: the department's own field guide places it only in the northern quarter of the state, the Glaciated Plains counties across the north, plus a separate, sparse population in the Bootheel region of southeastern Missouri along the Mississippi Lowlands.