Texas

Texas holds three huntable quail species that occupy genuinely different parts of the state. Northern bobwhite is found in nearly every county east of the Pecos River, with its two strongest concentrations in the South Texas Plains brush country and the Rolling Plains of the Panhandle, historically the state's highest-density bobwhite range. Scaled quail splits into two disconnected populations of two different subspecies: the Arizona scaled quail across the drier Trans-Pecos, High Plains, Rolling Plains, and Edwards Plateau, with the Trans-Pecos holding the state's largest population, and the chestnut-bellied scaled quail in the South Texas brush country from Brownsville north to around Del Rio, entirely separate from the Arizona subspecies' range. Gambel's quail sits at the eastern edge of its entire range, confined to a narrow strip of desert shrub and irrigated farmland along the Rio Grande from Lajitas north to El Paso, strongest where the river still carries active irrigation between Presidio and Redford. All three run under the same season, from early November through the end of February.

Plain chachalaca is the most geographically restricted huntable bird in the state, open only in the four southernmost counties of the Rio Grande Valley, Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy, where it holds to dense thorny thickets and scrubland along the river; public access runs through the Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area and Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. Ring-necked pheasant, cocks only, sits at the opposite end of the state, confined to the Panhandle and High Plains, where releases beginning in the 1940s established a population that expanded through more than 30 counties by the late 1970s before beginning a long decline; it remains the state's only legal pheasant range and runs a shorter, later season than the state's quail.