New Mexico

New Mexico's four quail species split cleanly by habitat and share one November-to-mid-February season. Gambel's quail is the state's desert quail, holding to warm, brushy lowlands near the southern border, with the Organ Mountains and Mesilla Valley area in Dona Ana County called out specifically. Scaled quail is the most widely distributed of the four, common across the eastern plains and rare in the northwest and north-central part of the state, with a strong showing on public land in the central and southeastern shinnery-oak counties (Lea and Eddy) and a separate, secondary population near Deming in the southwestern bootheel. Montezuma quail is New Mexico's mountain quail, confined to pine-oak woodland on steep slopes above roughly 4,000 feet, in the Sacramento, Capitan, and San Mateo mountains of the south-central and southwestern high country, and carries its own sub-limit inside the shared quail bag. Northern bobwhite sits at the extreme western edge of its range here, restricted to the same southeastern shinnery-oak country as scaled quail, around the Jal-to-Maljamar area and the land south of Hope in Lea and Eddy counties. New Mexico's only regulated grouse species, dusky grouse, is split by the same north-south line the state's bag limit already draws at Interstate 40: a genuine, if rare, population in the Sangre de Cristo, San Juan, and Jemez mountains of the north, and a much sparser, isolated presence in the Mogollon and other southern ranges, where the species has already disappeared from the nearby Zuni Mountains.

Ring-necked pheasant hunting has no wild-population survey behind it. A short, statewide over-the-counter season in mid-December (roosters only) is layered on top of resident-only draw-permit hunts at three Wildlife Management Areas spread across three different river systems: Bernardo, on the middle Rio Grande in central New Mexico; W.S. Huey, on the Pecos River in the southeast; and Jackson Lake, on the La Plata River in the far northwest. Band-tailed pigeon runs two zone-based seasons in September and October, a Regular Season covering most of the state and a separate Southwest Season south of U.S. Route 60 and west of Interstate 25.