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Michigan northern bobwhite hunting report

Last updated 2026-09-24 · from MDNR data · 2025–26 licence year

Northern bobwhite season is shut in Michigan and this app's copy of the 2025–26 licence year holds no further opening date. The best of the season is October and November. The bird is barely present in Michigan.

Season status

Today
Shut
Season
October 20, 2025 to November 14, 2025 — days by zone
Bag
5 per day, 10 in possession

Computed against the day this page was built, from MDNR's dates. This page carries no weather and no bird count: this app holds neither a hunting-weather model nor a population survey for northern bobwhite, and a report that invented either would be worse than one that says so.

September in the cover

The whole of a very short season. Michigan's population is small enough that finding a covey is the hard part, not timing it.

Broomsedge and native warm-season grass with bare ground under it, brushy field borders, and the edge of a cut field against a hedgerow. Quail need to walk under the cover, not through it, which is why manicured ground holds none.

Where the bird is

All but gone. It hangs on in a few of the southernmost counties and nowhere else, which the occurrence data on its card shows plainly, and Michigan publishes no bag limit for it.

Open this map in the app
Stronghold Regular Present Occasional No records The 10 units in the table below 3 units too small to draw
35 of 59 subbasins draining Michigan carry a northern bobwhite record. Observed occurrences, not a range map and not a habitat model. Scored as a share of all bird records in the same cell, so a well-watched county does not read as better bird country than an unwatched one. The mesh is the subbasin — the unit this app scores in — and not the state line, so its edge is a drainage divide rather than a border. The green is the 10 public units in the table below, drawn as PAD-US records their boundaries: context, not permission.

The other questions

By region

Open the hunting map →Public land and bird cover, drawn for the bird you are after.