North Dakota

North Dakota's pheasant range covers the western two-thirds of the state, with the northwest and southwest consistently the strongest of the four regions the state's brood survey tracks, the southeast improving but still behind, and the northeast the weakest. Season structure is a short youth weekend in early October ahead of the regular male-only season, which runs from mid-October through early January.

Gray (Hungarian) partridge leans the same direction as pheasant, toward the state's southwestern and northwestern counties, with Ward County in the north-central part of the state a longstanding local strong point. Sharp-tailed grouse is tracked on a different regional framework, three districts named prairie potholes, southwest, and drift prairie, plus Grand Forks County monitored separately in the far northeast; the prairie potholes and southwest districts consistently outperform drift prairie. Both species share a season running from mid-September through early January. Ruffed grouse is the outlier: rather than a statewide range with regional strength, it survives only in two isolated aspen-forest pockets, the Turtle Mountains (Bottineau and Rolette counties) and the Pembina Hills (Cavalier and Pembina counties), and the regulation itself restricts the season to those areas even though it reads as statewide on paper.