Washington · UplandRing-necked pheasant

Washington's pheasant hunting splits cleanly into two regionally and biologically distinct populations, matching the state's roosters-only-East / either-sex-West regulatory divide. Eastern Washington holds the state's genuine wild/self-sustaining population in Palouse and Columbia Basin wheat and CRP country: WDFW's 2025 harvest data shows Whitman County leading the entire state (5,095 birds, 1,350 hunters), with Walla Walla (3,171), Grant (4,881), Spokane (2,432), Lincoln (1,519), Garfield (1,533), Columbia (1,301), and Franklin (1,287) counties forming the core wheat-belt range. Western Washington pheasant hunting, by contrast, is almost entirely dependent on WDFW's put-and-take release program (over 50 release sites statewide split roughly evenly W/E, but Western WA has essentially no wild-reproducing population): Thurston County leads the West side (4,955 birds), with Whatcom (3,236), Snohomish (1,394), Clark (2,607), Mason (1,715), Island (1,295), King (1,194), and Pierce (1,191) rounding out the release-dependent counties. The non-release extended-season sites in Western Washington are Belfair, JBLM, Kosmos, Lincoln Creek, Scatter Creek, Skookumchuck, the Green Diamond resource lands, and Whidbey Island.