Montana

Ring-necked pheasant hunting concentrates in Montana's irrigated river-bottom agriculture rather than its dry, unirrigated plains generally: the strongest wild population runs along the north-central Rocky Mountain Front and Hi-Line grain belt (Cascade, Chouteau, and Pondera counties), a second population sits in the Milk and Missouri river valleys around Glasgow, Malta, and Havre, and a third follows the Yellowstone River corridor in the south and southeast; a smaller southwestern population near Townsend is topped up by state stocking. The season opens with a youth-only weekend in mid-to-late September, then residents statewide and some nonresident categories open in mid-October, with the remaining nonresident categories phased in over the following ten days, and all groups close on the first of January; roosters only. Chukar and gray (Hungarian) partridge share one combined bag and season, opening September 1 for residents (ten days later for nonresidents) and running to the start of January. Chukar concentrates specifically in Carbon County in south-central Montana, with a described stretch along the Bighorn Canyon area on the county's eastern edge carrying a slightly longer season. Gray partridge is far more widespread, following the wheat-farming country of the Golden Triangle and Hi-Line in north-central and northeastern Montana, with a smaller secondary population in the Townsend valley of the southwest. Greater sage-grouse and sharp-tailed grouse are both restricted to the plains east of the Continental Divide; sage-grouse concentrates in two mapped core areas, the Powder River Basin in the southeast and a Beaverhead-Madison county core in the southwest, while sharp-tailed grouse is common across the central and eastern two-thirds of the state, though its historically distinct western population survives today only through an active reintroduction program in the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and Flint Creek valleys, where hunting remains closed.

Dusky, ruffed, and spruce grouse share one combined "Mountain Grouse" bag limit and an identical September 1 to January 1 season with no nonresident delay, but each occupies a different slice of Montana's forest. Dusky grouse, called "blue grouse" in state regulations, is the most broadly distributed of the three, found across montane forest throughout western and central Montana, including isolated "island" mountain ranges like the Highwoods and Bear Paws that rise out of the central plains. Ruffed grouse sticks to a narrower habitat, riparian aspen and mixed-conifer stream bottoms in the western mountain valleys, with that same riparian-aspen habitat also reaching the Highwood and Bear Paw ranges further east. Spruce grouse, regulated as "Franklin's grouse," has the tightest range of the three, tied to true spruce-fir and lodgepole-pine forest in western Montana specifically, most densely documented in the northwestern corner of the state around the Flathead-Glacier area, without the central "island" range extension the other two mountain grouse show.