Quail hunts under $300 in Tennessee

What $60 to $300 actually buys

The bottom of the range isn't a discount on the guided hunt above it — it's a different product. Payne Quail Farm's $60 "grounds fee per shooter" gets you into the field with your own dog, no guide, no birds included in the price beyond what's already on the ground. Its own $300 "Guided Mixed Bag Hunt" is the opposite end of the same farm's menu: a guide, dogs, and quail, pheasant and chukar all worked in one afternoon.

Everything from $250 up is a guided hunt, per shooter, with the outfitter supplying the dogs: The Bearded Birddog's $250 Intro to Quail in Talbott, The Preserve at Darby Brothers Farms' $275 half-day in Greenfield, and Covey Creek's $280 half-day in Five Points. Cedar Rock Hunting Preserve's $250 is priced differently again — a flat "minimum bird purchase" on its self-guided front field, not a per-person rate. Guide and dogs come standard on six of the eight packages; a guide alone, with no dogs listed, on one more.

Cumberland Fields Sportsman's Club sits in the middle at $150, and it's the cheapest guided option on the list — a flat guide-and-dogs fee the private club charges non-members for a day in the field.

Six outfitters, not the fifteen-plus the state holds

Tennessee's quail-hunting corpus runs much wider than this list: outfitters like Windy Hill Farm & Preserve (from $750), Baggenstoss Farms (from $390) and Sawbriar Hunting (from $375) all sell real, bookable quail hunts — they just don't sell one at $300 or under. That's most of where a $400-to-$800 figure for "a guided Tennessee quail hunt" comes from, and it isn't wrong, it's a different question than this page answers.

One outfitter that does show up elsewhere in the search results, R and D Adventures, isn't on this list for a narrower reason: its cheapest number is a $65 half-day guide fee, not a hunt price — it's what you pay the guide, on top of whatever the birds and grounds cost separately. Treating a day rate as the price of the hunt is exactly the math that makes a preserve look cheaper than it is, and it's a mistake we've made and fixed before.

What the state adds on top

None of the eight prices above include a Tennessee hunting license. A nonresident who's only after quail doesn't need the $214 seven-day all-game license — TWRA's $61 seven-day small-game/waterfowl license covers it, and a resident sportsman's annual runs $33 to $165 depending on age. Add the license before you compare a $300 quail hunt to a $275 one twenty miles away; the birds aren't what makes the difference, the paperwork is the same either way.

Cedar Rock leads on rating, and the reviews back it up

Of the six, Cedar Rock Hunting Preserve carries by far the deepest track record — 63 Google reviews at 4.7 stars, more than the other five combined. I've hunted quail there myself, and the volume of reviews tracks with what a bird preserve on the Duck River should look like after years of Saturday hunts. Payne Quail Farm and The Bearded Birddog are smaller and newer to the review count but carry a perfect 5.0 across a dozen and six reviews respectively — worth booking on their own merits, not just as a cheaper Cedar Rock.