West Virginia · UplandNorthern bobwhite quail

West Virginia's bobwhite quail season is nominally open statewide, but the species had no wild breeding population at all for over 50 years. It disappeared in the late 1970s after severe winters compounded decades of habitat loss, and the gap lasted until the state's own Governor's Quail Stocking Initiative, a five-year restoration program launched in 2020. Bobwhite quail hunting is closed specifically on Tomblin Wildlife Management Area in Logan County, which WVDNR's own program page explains: Tomblin WMA was the initiative's founding site, where 48 birds were released in February 2020 and the resulting brood was West Virginia's first wild brood in more than 50 years. The real, monitored population sits at this closed-to-hunting site. The initiative has since expanded well beyond Tomblin, stocking over 20,000 birds across six WMAs and one state forest spanning every part of the state: Tomblin (Logan County, southwestern WV), Laurel Lake (Mingo County, southwestern WV), Frozen Camp (Jackson County, west-central WV), Burnsville Lake (Braxton County, central WV), Huttonsville State Farm (Randolph County, eastern highlands), Pleasant Creek (Barbour/Taylor counties, north-central WV), and Cross Creek (Brooke County, northern panhandle).