Pheasant hunts under $400 in Tennessee

What $60 to $400 actually buys

The bottom of the range isn't a discount on the guided hunts above it, and it doesn't stay cheap all the way up. Three of these six outfitters don't provide a guide at all: Payne Quail Farm's $60 grounds fee gets you into the field with your own dog and gun; Cedar Rock Hunting Preserve's $250 "Minimum Bird Purchase" is a flat self-guided rate on its front field; and Baggenstoss Farms charges $390 per gun for its own non-guided hunt — more than either of the two guided hunts on this list that already include a dog and a guide. Whether a guide comes with the price is worth checking before the price itself does the talking.

Payne Quail Farm also sells the guided version of that same hunt for $300: a guide, dogs, and pheasant worked with you instead of around you. Sawbriar Hunting's $375 half-day in Allardt, Creekside Hunting Preserve's $400 half-day in Athens, and The Bearded Birddog's $400 "Intro to Upland" in Talbott are guided the same way — dogs and a guide standard on all three.

Six outfitters, and a bird the database files with them but the market doesn't

Tennessee's pheasant-taxonomy corpus runs to 39 packages across 17 outfitters once you count everything above $400, up to an $8,250 tower shoot at Parker's Outfitting for a group of 12 to 36 guns. It also holds two chukar-only hunts at Creekside Hunting Preserve, at $280 and $400, that this list leaves out on purpose: chukar and pheasant share a database category here, but no outfitter sells them as the same bird. Meadow Brook Game Farm's own price sheet offers "4 pheasant OR 6 chukar OR 8 quail" as three separate choices at the same money for different bird counts, and Baggenstoss Farms markets "pheasant, and chukar" as two things, not one. Creekside still makes this list — on a separate, pheasant-only $400 package, not its cheaper chukar hunts.

That's also where a $400-to-$800 figure for Tennessee pheasant hunting comes from, if you've seen one: it's arithmetic, not a listed price. Flat Top Mountain Hunting Preserve's public rate is $700 flat for up to six hunters and 12 birds — divide it out and you land under $120 a gun, cheaper than everything on this list except Payne's own $60 hunt. None of the eight prices above requires you to round up five more hunters before you find out what you'd pay.

No Tennessee hunting license required — usually

None of these eight prices need a state hunting license behind them. Pheasant, chukar and quail raised and released on a licensed preserve are covered by the preserve's own commercial permit, not by TWRA's game seasons — the same rule that lets a preserve run hunts through the summer, long after wild-bird seasons have closed everywhere else. The one exception: if the preserve also holds naturally occurring wild game inside its boundaries, or sits on a state Wildlife Management Area, the standard license and stamps apply on top. Ask the outfitter which situation is theirs before you assume $400 is the whole number.

Baggenstoss ranks first; the pheasant reviews aren't all at the top

Baggenstoss Farms carries the deepest track record of the six — 102 Google reviews at 4.9 stars, more than the other five combined. Read past the star count, though, and a lot of it is about the property's zip line and campground rather than its birds; Baggenstoss runs both businesses on the same land, and reviewers thank the same guides for both in the same breath. For a pheasant hunt described in the reviewer's own words, Creekside Hunting Preserve, Cedar Rock Hunting Preserve and Sawbriar Hunting are where those reviews actually sit. Cedar Rock is one I can speak to directly — I've hunted there myself, on a guided quail hunt on the same grounds this pheasant package covers.