Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania's bobwhite quail season exists on paper against an essentially extirpated wild population; a nominal no-bag-limit season runs from September through March, but the state's only current birds are a Pennsylvania Game Commission reintroduction at the Letterkenny Army Depot Bobwhite Quail Focus Area in Franklin County, on land ceded by the Army starting in 2017, closed to both hunting and release. Historically the state's most consistent quail country was a handful of southern counties, Franklin, Chester, Adams, and York, before the range contracted through the 1800s. Ring-necked pheasant follows a similar wild-versus-stocked split, but with an actual huntable wild population: two Wild Pheasant Recovery Areas, one spanning Northumberland, Montour, and Columbia counties and one in Franklin County, hold wild-trapped, self-sustaining birds and ban the release of farm-raised pheasants outright, while two other recovery areas elsewhere in the state were dissolved after failing to establish. Outside those two areas, essentially all pheasant hunting runs on stocked birds, more than 225,000 released annually across state game lands in every part of Pennsylvania, plus a smaller release in February; the regular season runs late October through late December and resumes after Christmas into February, with an earlier youth weekend in mid-October.

Ruffed grouse, the state bird, splits into a North Zone and a South Zone with a real density gap between them, not just an administrative line. The North Zone, the Allegheny high plateau counties of the northwest and northcentral part of the state, including Potter, Tioga, Clinton, Lycoming, Cameron, McKean, and Elk, carries flush rates far higher than the South Zone at every population tier and has historically produced the large majority of the state's grouse harvest. Within the South Zone, the Southcentral and Northeast regions hold large forested tracts that currently underperform their habitat potential, while the Southeast's smaller population has shown unusually strong resistance to West Nile virus. The season runs mid-October through late December statewide.