Photo by Ron Sinfelt

Although Illinois' upland game hunters may dream of cackling roosters busting cover on a crisp November morning, pheasants are seldom part of the American Dream -- which is a house on five country acres.

My extremely small slice of the country pie is an exception, with two of the five acres in switchgrass, an acre in a food plot, an acre of woods landscaped to create a whitetail funnel and a yard that is too big to mow with a push mower.

Back in 1991 when my wife and I purchased this property in northern Winnebago County near the Illinois/Wisconsin border, there was still a lot of CRP acreage in this north-central Illinois county and the surrounding area. As CRP enrollment ended, the sound of cackling pheasants just sort of faded away. We still hear them now and then, and even see a rooster once in awhile. I keep a .270 by the patio door with a clip nearby and ready to go -- just in case. But I would never shoot any of the few ringnecks that do hang around. The .270 is for coyotes. We have a bunch of coyotes in the neighborhood, with two or three of them meeting the big adios on my property every year.

It seems like every time you shoot one coyote, two or three of his cousins show up for the funeral and never leave. Herein lies a hidden incubus in the American dream. Small tracts of switchgrass attract pheasants, but parcels of cover like my two separate acres of switchgrass and filter strips in grain fields are great ambush sites for Wile E. Coyote and his posse.

"The best pheasant habitat we have in Illinois is undisturbed grass cover in CRP fields and filter strips," said Department of Natural Resources pheasant chief John Cole.

Cole is absolutely correct. The kicker is that coyotes and other predators are every bit as efficient at hunting upland game as you and Ol' Shep. And natural predators are not bound by harvest guidelines like the two rooster-only daily bags or hunting during daylight hours.

Although the coyote's diet is primarily small rodents, they occasionally sneak up on a pheasant that is having a bad day. If this bird is a tight-sitting hen, the future of pheasant procreation next spring takes an even more serious hit.

Coyotes and other natural predators are a radical factor that wildlife managers don't like to talk about. Projecting pheasant numbers from survey data like call counts in the spring and nest surveys are a less than perfect science at best.

From this data, Cole estimates a fall ringneck harvest of about 181,976 statewide, which is down significantly from the 1999-2003 average of 285,020. But it could be worse. The reason for an anticipated increase in the pheasant harvest this year comes from a combination of call counts, nesting surveys and weather patterns between season's end last fall and early summer.

"Winter temperatures were fairly mild and most precipitation fell as rain," Cole recalled. "There were no extended periods of deep snow or heavy accumulation of ice last winter."

An ice storm can devastate the ringneck population in just a few days. Illinois has several major climatic zones. Downstate winter precipitation often falls as freezing rain rather than snow, laminating food with an impenetrable crystal shell and clogging the bird's beaks. In southern Illinois, temperatures usually warm to above the freezing mark in a day or two. But subfreezing temps can hold on long enough to be fatal to birds in central Illinois, which has always been the epicenter of pheasant production in our state.

Get south of Vandalia and pheasants are and always have been a rarity. The soil type and general habitat is more conducive downstate to growing quail rather than pheasants.

Downstate counties are where most of the estimated quail harvest of 204,236 birds will come from this fall, with projections down from the 1999-2003 average of 285,200, according to Cole. The latter numbers in both the pheasant and quail estimates are easier to calculate because bird counters have more information like hunter success surveys to employ while making their projections.