Last updated 2026-09-24 · from VDWR data ·
2026–27 licence year
Ring-necked pheasant season is shut in Virginia today. It opens November 7, 2026 — 44 days away. The bird is barely present in Virginia.
Season status
Today
Shut
Next opening
November 7, 2026
Season
November 7, 2026 to January 31, 2027 — 86 days afield
Bag
not published
Computed against the day this page was built, from VDWR'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
No self-sustaining wild population. Virginia runs a season and publishes no bag limit for it, and what is actually hunted is released birds on licensed shooting preserves.
StrongholdRegularPresentOccasionalNo recordsThe 10 units in the table below6 units too small to draw
32 of 53 subbasins draining Virginia 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.