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North Carolina ring-necked pheasant hunting report

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

Ring-necked pheasant season is open in North Carolina today in Remainder of the state, and shuts February 28. The bird is barely present in North Carolina.

Season status

Today
Open in Remainder of the state
Next opening
November 21, 2026 — Barrier islands of Carteret, Dare and Hyde counties
Season
September 5, 2026 to February 28, 2027 — days by zone
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 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

A naturalised population on the barrier islands of Carteret, Dare and Hyde — Hatteras and Ocracoke — hunted as a wild bird, males only. On the mainland the long either-sex season is a released-bird season.

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
24 of 46 subbasins draining North Carolina 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.