North Carolina

North Carolina's most consistent upland season is northern bobwhite quail, running statewide from late November through the end of February. The state's Wildlife Resources Commission has surveyed density since 1957 and finds a clear regional split: the Coastal Plain holds the most quail, the Piedmont, especially the Sandhills straddling the Coastal Plain line, an intermediate population, and the mountains none at all, with the last mountain survey routes dropped after they stopped detecting birds. The commission runs habitat restoration in two Coastal Plain focus areas, around Halifax and Northampton counties in the north and near Rowland in Robeson County in the south, plus a third in the western Piedmont near Turnersburg in Iredell County. Ring-necked pheasant hunting is legally open across most of the state, either sex, from early September through the end of February, with a later-starting, male-only season on the Barrier Islands of Carteret, Dare, and Hyde counties. The bird itself survives only on Core Banks in Carteret County, an isolated, roughly forty-year-old population kept separate from the mainland by the barrier islands themselves; a second Barrier Islands population, on Hatteras Island in Dare County, was extirpated around 1991, though the regulatory zone covering it remains in place.

Ruffed grouse holds to North Carolina's western mountains, running mid-October through the end of February. The state's Wildlife Resources Commission has tracked drumming activity since 2002 across the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests, the largest single block of habitat and hunting opportunity in the state, supplemented since 2018 by survey routes on Cold Mountain, Needmore, Sandy Mush, and Silver game lands. A newer set of routes across Ashe, Alleghany, Henderson, Madison, Watauga, and Wilkes counties detects grouse far less often on private land than on the public forests and game lands, even though those counties sit within the bird's broader range; a few remnant birds also persist in northern Piedmont counties outside the surveyed mountain region.