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Michigan ring-necked pheasant hunting report

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

Ring-necked pheasant 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 well established in Michigan.

Season status

Today
Shut
Season
October 10, 2025 to January 1, 2026 — days by zone
Bag
2 per day, 4 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 ring-necked pheasant, and a report that invented either would be worse than one that says so.

September in the cover

The opening week, before the roosters have learned to run. It gets harder every day after that.

The seam between grass nesting cover and grain: switchgrass and CRP-style fields, cattail sloughs, weedy fencelines and picked corn. A pheasant runs before it flies, so the cover that matters is the cover it can run through.

Where the bird is

The southern third, on the grass-and-grain edge, and zoned into three for the season. Ten Upper Peninsula counties are shut to it entirely.

Open this map in the app
Stronghold Regular Present Occasional No records The 10 units in the table below 1 unit too small to draw
45 of 59 subbasins draining Michigan carry a ring-necked pheasant 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.