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Ring-necked pheasant hunting in south-east Wisconsin

Last updated 2026-09-24 · from WDNR data · 2026 season year

Ring-necked pheasant hunting in south-east Wisconsin. The season runs October 17, 2026 to January 3, 2027 — 79 days afield. 115 public units and 217,791 acres fall inside this region, the largest of them White River Marsh Wildlife Area at 12,608 acres. The bird is well established in Wisconsin.

• The ground
• The cover
• Season and limits
• Public land here
• Weather and timing
• The place

The ground

Farm and marsh: Horicon, the Kettle Moraine units, cattail sloughs and grass wildlife areas inside an hour of Milwaukee and Madison. Small parcels, hard edges, heavy pressure on opening weekend. The Kettle Moraine itself is the other half of the region and reads nothing like the marsh — oak and hickory on glacial hills, broken by pasture and cropland, which is turkey ground rather than pheasant ground.

Written for this app — not an agency description. Everything below that is a rule or a number names the source it came from.

The cover, and how it is hunted

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.

Work fields toward a hard edge — a road, a ditch, a corner — so running birds run out of ground rather than out the far end. Blocking a corner is worth more than another pass through the middle.

A flushing dog that stays inside gun range, or a pointer steady enough to relocate on a running bird. Retrieving matters here more than on grouse: a hit rooster in heavy grass is a lost rooster without a dog.

Season and limits

WDNR's dates for the 2026 season year, read from WDNR. Wisconsin lists this season as Ring-necked pheasant.

Public land in south-east Wisconsin

115 units and 217,791 acres, out of 507 huntable units in Wisconsin. WDNR does not publish a per-parcel species list, so this is not filtered to ring-necked pheasant.

Ordered by recorded acres — how much of each unit lies inside subbasins where ring-necked pheasant is recorded at regular strength or better — rather than by how big the unit is. The biggest block in a state is often not in the half of it the bird is in. PAD-US splits a forest into many parcels, so acreage is summed over the unit's name, and the share is measured against the unit's drawn boundary rather than a centroid: a national forest can be two polygons across half a peninsula.

WDNR names no geographic restriction on this season, so no unit is excluded for being outside one.
Season geography here is read off a dates table rather than the rule itself, and a dates table carries no boundary.

A region here is a bounding box — 42.4° to 44.1° north, 89.5° to 87.4° west — and not a boundary anybody drew on the ground. A unit that straddles the edge is placed by where its middle is. PAD-US says who manages a parcel, not where its line runs and not whether it carries a local closure: context, not permission. Check the unit with WDNR before you park.

Weather and timing

Mild and open into November. Cattail marsh is the late-season cover once the grass has flattened.

The place

The state's pheasant country, and largely a stocked-bird tradition on the public units. Hunting is a weekday game if you can manage one.

Read next

• Ring-necked pheasant hunting in Wisconsin — season, limits and range
• Ring-necked pheasant — biology, range and how it is hunted
• How to hunt ring-necked pheasant in Wisconsin
• Where to hunt ring-necked pheasant in Wisconsin
• Wisconsin hunting regulations

Other regions in Wisconsin

• Grouse hunting in the Wisconsin Northwoods
• Grouse hunting in the Wisconsin Driftless
• Woodcock hunting in the Wisconsin Northwoods
• Woodcock hunting in the Wisconsin Driftless
• Turkey hunting in the Wisconsin Driftless

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