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Michigan sharp-tailed grouse hunting report

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

Sharp-tailed grouse season is shut in Michigan and this app's copy of the 2025–26 licence year holds no further opening date. The bird is thin and local in Michigan.

Season status

Today
Shut
Season
October 10, 2025 to October 31, 2025 — 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 sharp-tailed grouse, and a report that invented either would be worse than one that says so.

September in the cover

Open brushland — grass and low scrub with scattered clumps of aspen or willow, bog margin, and the pine barrens where sand keeps the timber from closing in. It is the opposite of grouse cover: if you cannot see a long way, you are in the wrong place.

Where the bird is

Michigan's sharptail is one population in the eastern Upper Peninsula and the state hunts it — four fifths of Michigan's records fall in Chippewa and Mackinac counties, and so does the whole of the open unit. The Department of Natural Resources opens it October 10 to 31 inside the zone 1 sharp-tailed grouse management unit and nowhere else in the state, on a free stamp. The unit's boundary runs on roads and rivers inside those two counties and is not drawn in this app.

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
22 of 59 subbasins draining Michigan carry a sharp-tailed 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

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