You file this the way you’d file for a tag. Applications are worked in the order they arrive and access opens in batches — the wait we’re aiming at is about two weeks. It costs nothing, and there’s no account to make.
Numbered in the order they appear in the finished plan — the destinations decide the windows, the windows decide what pairs, and the licence work follows from both.
State, region and sub-state area — ordered against your own constraints, each one stating why it sits where it does rather than leaving you to infer it.
Season dates, the best stretch inside them, and what else is open in the same window — which is the whole job when you're building a road trip rather than a day hunt.
Birds whose seasons and country actually overlap, not species that merely share a calendar month in different halves of the state.
What you have to buy for each state, what it costs, and any controlled-hunt application deadline that would otherwise pass while you were still deciding.
Walk-in programs, access atlases, and the specific things worth verifying before you drive — including refuge units with delayed openers.
Which survey backs it, when it was run, what it measures — and, just as often, that nothing has published yet and the rank is built on season structure instead.
Every state and species named links to its own page here, so you can check the planner's work against the same source it read.
Season dates, bag limits, shooting hours and access rules are already on this site for all fifty states — the planner reasons over the same records you can read yourself at /states and /species. It isn’t a separate database you have to trust blind.
Most states haven’t released a 2026 brood survey. A tool that ranks states anyway is guessing at you. This one names the gap and ranks on what’s actually measured.
Each destination carries the survey behind it, the date it was run, and what it does and doesn’t measure — so you can disagree with it on the evidence.
Dates, drive tolerance, budget, party size, dog or no dog, public or private, whether you’d enter a draw. Change one and the plan changes.