West Virginia

Ruffed grouse is West Virginia's genuine wild upland bird, concentrated in the state's eastern highlands, the Allegheny Mountains, rather than spread evenly across the state's mostly forested terrain. The Monongahela National Forest, spanning ten counties in that eastern region, holds the core range, with Tucker County and Randolph County's Kumbrabrow State Forest named specifically as strong within-region ground.

Ring-necked pheasant hunting is nominally statewide, cocks only, but the state is heavily forested and inhospitable to this grassland bird outside one specific place: Hillcrest Wildlife Management Area, a former cattle farm in the northern panhandle's Hancock County, actively managed with grain plantings and understood to be the only site left with any real wild birds, carrying its own narrower sub-season. Northern bobwhite quail had no wild breeding population at all for more than fifty years after disappearing in the late 1970s, until the state's Governor's Quail Stocking Initiative began releasing birds at Tomblin Wildlife Management Area in Logan County in 2020, producing the state's first wild-hatched brood in half a century; hunting is closed at Tomblin itself to protect that population, and the initiative has since expanded releases to six more sites spanning every part of the state.