New York · UplandNorthern bobwhite quail

New York's huntable bobwhite range is split between one real (if collapsing) wild population and one stocked, put-and-take area, and the two should not be conflated. DEC's own Species Status Assessment states plainly that wild, self-sustaining quail populations in New York are now restricted to Long Island, backed by a call-count survey in Suffolk County running since 1979 that has collapsed from an annual average of 101 calling males in the 1980s to 41 in the 1990s to about 10 over the most recent 12 years covered, with zero calling males heard in 2011 and 2012. The second Breeding Bird Atlas documented a 35% decline in Long Island occupancy and confirmed breeding fell from 105 to 17 blocks between atlases; bobwhite had nearly disappeared from Nassau County by that point. Orange County's separate open season (upstate, Hudson Valley) is not backed by a wild population of the same kind. DEC's own SSA attributes the scattered pattern of upstate records, with a few clusters of contiguous blocks, to captive-raised/released birds rather than a self-sustaining wild population (McGowan 2008).