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North Carolina ruffed grouse hunting report

Last updated 2026-09-24 · from NCWRC data · 2026–27 season year

Ruffed grouse season is shut in North Carolina today. It opens October 12, 2026 — 18 days away. The bird is thin and local in North Carolina.

Season status

Today
Shut
Next opening
October 12, 2026
Season
October 12, 2026 to February 28, 2027 — 140 days afield
Bag
not published

Computed against the day this page was built, from NCWRC'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

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

The western mountain counties and effectively nowhere else — the Blue Ridge escarpment, and the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests. The season is written statewide; the bird is not.

Open this map in the app
Stronghold Regular Present Occasional No records The 10 units in the table below 6 units too small to draw
15 of 46 subbasins draining North Carolina 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

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