Washington · UplandNorthern bobwhite quail

Northern bobwhite in Washington is a genuinely scattered, hard-to-pin-down species rather than one with a clean regional stronghold, though a real if narrow pattern does exist. Three subspecies have been introduced into Washington since the first known release on Whidbey Island (Island County) in 1871; a Walla Walla County population established via 1920 introductions persisted for decades but is now believed extirpated (last confirmed sighting 1988). The one location an independent source (BirdWeb, the Seattle Audubon field guide) describes as currently established locally is the prairies of southern Puget Sound, the Puget Trough grasslands in Thurston and Pierce counties. Beyond that, the same source states plainly that frequent introductions make the species' distribution difficult to predict, since it is almost never in the same place from one year to the next, and current bag limits are structured as a mixed bag shared with California quail rather than tracked separately, consistent with the species not having its own distinct WDFW-published range. Only one locally-established population is current; the historical sites are not.