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Minnesota ring-necked pheasant hunting report

Last updated 2026-09-24 · from MN DNR data · 2026 season year

Ring-necked pheasant season is shut in Minnesota today. It opens October 10, 2026 — 16 days away. The bird is well established in Minnesota.

Season status

Today
Shut
Next opening
October 10, 2026
Season
October 10, 2026 to January 3, 2027 — 86 days afield
Bag
not published

Computed against the day this page was built, from MN DNR'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 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 south-west and south-central farmland, and nothing north of it. The season is statewide and the birds are not — the range follows the grassland and CRP acres of the prairie counties.

Open this map in the app
Stronghold Regular Present Occasional No records The 10 units in the table below 2 units too small to draw
56 of 72 subbasins draining Minnesota 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

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