All of the information is plugged into established formulas that have been in place since before coyotes became a major menace in this state. But why is the estimated harvest this fall at 181,976 instead of rounding the number off to the nearest hundred or even thousand?

After the DNR released fall harvest estimates last summer, one of my neighbors saw a coyote crossing the road with a hen pheasant in its mouth. This predator kill doesn't decrease the fall harvest estimate by one bird because it was a hen. But odds are about half of the eight to 14 young chicks this hen was tending to were roosters, with the other half carrying the potential for a geometric increase in the bird population for the 2006 season. None of these chicks will survive, even though there were adequate forbs to attract insects for the chicks to feed on when momma became a coyote entrée.

Ask anybody -- anybody -- in the DNR how many coyotes there are in Illinois and they can't tell you. The professional wildlife managers can't give you a number like 181,976 or even come within a couple thousand. They simply don't know.

Calculating CRP acreage is considerably easier. We have about 200,000 acres of CRP participation in Illinois, according to Cole. About 80,000 acres of that is in filter strips rather than in vast tracts of undisturbed grass like found in neighboring states and the Great Plains.

Back in 1973 I harvested 73 wild ringnecks in Illinois. The daily bag limit was three birds that year -- the only year in my lifetime the bag was three instead of two. Back in the early 1970s, Illinois hunters usually killed over 500,000 birds in a typical pheasant season. One year the harvest was over 1 million. Let me tell you what has happened since this pheasant heyday, Sonny.

Back in the day, the Illinois landscape was mostly a matrix of family farms with a lot of edges and fencerows providing pheasant habitat. Then corporate farms arrived on the scene. Fencerows were ripped out to plant virtually every tillable acre thanks to factors like U.S. government policy, grain deals with the Soviet Union and a host of other factors. Then we got three real tough winters from 1979-'81. With little overwinter habitat to seek refuge in, pheasant numbers nosedived.

If it weren't for Pheasants Forever, your kids would be seeing the ringneck next to the passenger pigeon under the "extinct" sign on a class trip to Springfield. The government's CRP helped, too, but it was essentially a flip-flop -- instead of planting every available acre, the government figured it would make more sense to pay farmers not to plant crops.

This is a great deal for the farmer in places like North Dakota where land values are cheap. That's a major reason why that Great Plains state has over 3.3 million acres of set-aside pheasant habitat. Our neighbor to the west, Iowa, has about half this much ground in CRP, about 1.9 million acres!

"Spiraling land values in Illinois is the primary reason you don't see more CRP participation," Cole said.

In places like north-central Illinois' Winnebago County where I live -- which the DNR cites as prime pheasant habitat -- the American Dream of the house and five acres driven by suburban sprawl is further decimating habitat. Rural five-acre parcels are rare in Winnebago County. Five acres directly adjacent to my "farmette" just sold for over $10,000 per acre. Some good farm ground two counties west in more rural Carroll County -- where natural pheasant habitat isn't quite as good -- typically goes for almost $3,000 per acre.

When you pay that much money for cropland, government subsidy for set-aside won't generate enough money to pay the bank. At $2.50 per bushel for corn, I don't see how farmers can make a living off of crops, either. On private ground with land prices at $3,000 per acre it usually makes more sense to plant corn -- even at $2.50 per bushel -- than to leave it in CRP.