Oregon

California (valley) quail is Oregon's most widely distributed upland bird, found statewide in brushy cover near water and food, from farm country to city edges, though the state's own hunting forecast currently points to Harney, Malheur, Grant, Baker, Heppner, and Mid-Columbia, all in eastern Oregon, as the strongest districts. Mountain quail shares California quail's season and bag limit but sits at the opposite end of the map: greatest abundance in southwestern Oregon, thinning gradually to the north, with a secondary population in northwestern Oregon that favors the brushy regrowth left by logging and fire. Chukar and gray (Hungarian) partridge are both eastern-Oregon-only birds sharing one season and bag limit: chukar holds to the steep, dry rimrock and canyon country along the Deschutes, John Day, Snake, Malheur, and Owyhee rivers and the Steens, Hart, and Trout Creek mountains, while partridge sits in the agricultural valleys of the Columbia Basin and northeastern Oregon, strongest around Umatilla, Morrow, Gilliam, and Sherman counties. Quail run from September or October, depending on the east/west zone, through the end of January; chukar and partridge share a season from mid-October through the end of January.

Ring-necked pheasant hunting divides cleanly between a wild, self-sustaining population in the Columbia Basin districts of eastern Oregon, Heppner, Umatilla, Mid-Columbia, Harney, and Union, and a put-and-take program in the west, where the historic Willamette Valley population, once a founding site of the bird's introduction to North America, has all but disappeared. Four stocked wildlife areas, Denman, Fern Ridge, Sauvie Island, and E.E. Wilson, now carry essentially all of the western hunting opportunity; both the wild eastern population and the stocked western one run under the same roosters-only season, mid-October through the end of December. Forest grouse split along a similar east-west line. Ruffed grouse is the most widespread, present on both sides of the Cascades: the Blue Mountains and east-Cascades slope in the east, favoring brushy riparian corridors, and the Coast Range, Umpqua basin, and western Cascades foothills in the west, favoring young, disturbance-opened woodland. What Oregon's regulations still group together as "blue grouse" is actually two species sharing one season with a hard geographic split: dusky grouse in the Blue Mountains of the northeast, sooty grouse across the Coast Range, Cascades, and Warner Mountains of the west and south-central part of the state. All three forest grouse open in early September and run through the end of January. Greater sage-grouse is the state's one permit-only upland hunt, drawn separately each year for a short hunt in September across nine named units in the sagebrush high desert of the far southeastern corner, the Northern Basin and Range ecoregion running from Burns south to the Nevada border. Band-tailed pigeon rounds out the list with a short early-September season and no regional split; it is hunted statewide.