New York

New York's upland hunting splits sharply between two birds propped up almost entirely by stocking and one wild population with real survey depth. Ring-necked pheasant hunting runs on a color-coded zone map built around release logistics rather than wild-bird density: the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) releases about 50,000 pen-raised birds each fall from the Reynolds Game Farm near Ithaca to more than 100 public sites across all eight DEC regions. The yellow (Northern) and light-blue (Southern) zones run the full season, opening in early-to-mid October and continuing through the end of February with cocks and hens both legal; the green zone in western New York and the Long Island zones east of the Shinnecock Canal and Inlet open a few weeks later and close at the end of December, cocks only. Youth hunt weekends fall in late September or October depending on zone. Bobwhite quail hunting is legal in only two places, and only one holds a genuine wild population: Suffolk County on Long Island, where DEC's own call-count survey has tracked a steep, decades-long decline. Orange County in the Hudson Valley carries a separate season, but DEC attributes its scattered records to captive-raised, released birds rather than a self-sustaining population.

Ruffed grouse is New York's one broadly wild, well-studied upland bird, with a clear north-south density gradient documented by two separate DEC survey efforts: a spring drumming count and a fall hunter cooperator log. The Adirondacks-Tug Hill region holds the state's strongest numbers, followed by the Champlain Valley, and the broader Northern hunting zone, which opens in late September, consistently outperforms the Southern zone, which opens about ten days later. Grouse have effectively disappeared from Long Island and thinned out across the Hudson Valley and surrounding highlands; the Catskills-Delaware Hills stand out as a region with comparatively good habitat that hasn't translated into a strong population. Hunting is closed on Long Island and in New York City.