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Michigan ruffed grouse hunting report

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

Ruffed grouse 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. The bird is a stronghold in Michigan.

Season status

Today
Shut
Season
September 15, 2025 to January 1, 2026 — 93 days afield
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 ruffed grouse, and a report that invented either would be worse than one that says so.

September in the cover

The two weeks either side of the leaf drop, when the birds are still in the young cover and you can finally see through it.

Aspen and mixed brush between about five and twenty years old — cut-over ground rather than big timber, thick enough that you cannot see far into it. The best of it is an edge: young cut against older hardwood, or the alder seam where the cut runs down to wet ground.

Where the bird is

Michigan's premier game bird and the one the state is known for. The northern Lower and the Upper Peninsula carry it in numbers, on the aspen cut that decades of forestry have kept coming.

Open this map in the app
Stronghold Regular Present Occasional No records The 10 units in the table below
47 of 59 subbasins draining Michigan carry a ruffed grouse 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.