West Virginia · UplandRing-necked pheasant

West Virginia's pheasant season is nominally cock-only statewide, but the state is 80% forested and structurally inhospitable to this grassland species outside one specific site. Wonderful West Virginia (WVDNR's own outdoor magazine) states plainly that Hillcrest Wildlife Management Area, a 2,212-acre former cattle farm in Hancock County (the state's northern panhandle, in the Ohio River Valley near New Cumberland), is 'the only place left, possibly throughout the state, where there's any wild birds.' The same source traces the species' historic range to the broader Ohio River Basin counties before industrial development and post-World War II forest succession eliminated most of the state's grassland habitat. WVDNR manages Hillcrest intensively for pheasant specifically -- planting corn, sorghum, and wheat, and running annual population surveys with federal partners -- and runs a separate, narrower cock-only sub-season there (with a tighter 1-bird bag/possession limit versus 2 elsewhere) precisely because it is the state's one site with an actual population to manage, not just a stocked put-and-take area.