Many old farm buildings in our northern counties are pheasant magnets. Photo by Ted Peck.

Pheasant season opens Nov. 4 this year in Illinois, and Department of Natural Resources chief pheasant biologist John Cole is "cautiously optimistic" about our hunting prospects between now and season's end.

"Pheasants are very adaptable birds," Cole said. "Although adult birds are vulnerable to weather events like a winter ice storm, exceptionally wet springs or other conditions that can impact brood success, if the birds have a matrix of habitat, they will survive and prosper."

The Pheasants Forever mantra "habitat is the key" is right on target for upland game.

Back in the early 1970s, pheasants were a byproduct of agriculture, thriving on small family farms where fields were divided by sometimes overgrown fencerows, waterways coursed through small dips in tillable ground, and deeper ditches provided a fortress of canebreak and foxtail grass for birds to escape into.

We had a three-rooster limit back in 1973, with Illinois hunters harvesting a million ringnecks that year. With the help of an eager but hard-mouthed yellow Lab named Jill, I contributed 73 wild Illinois roosters to this tally.

Jill met an untimely death in '75 and was replaced by Rufus, a black Lab with a soft mouth who had the misguided notion that her life's work was wrestling with skunks. Rufus retrieved 50-plus birds every autumn until a change in government policy put virtually every acre into crop production and three successive brutal winters dealt the ringneck population a blow from which it never fully recovered.

I can remember hunting ringnecks in December 1980 behind my home in rural Winnebago County wearing hip boots because the snow was so deep. There was snow as far as you could see in all directions, with one usually productive fenceline little more than a bump in this white carpet. Pheasants were burrowed under the snow here. Rufus plunged her head through the drifts up to her shoulders and caught me a limit of pheasants with no need to pull the trigger.

I was a young man then, like many other hunters believing those three tough winters and a lack of habitat would be little more than speed bumps, with a return to those days of milk and honey just around the corner.

We were wrong. If it weren't for Pheasants Forever and changes in government policy in the form of substantial Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) legislation, Illinois' wild ringnecks would have been nothing more than taxidermy next to stuffed passenger pigeons at the Illinois Natural History Museum.

With many farmers jumping on the 10-year CRP bandwagon, habitat returned, and so did the pheasants. When this decade-long program ended, thousands of acres of habitat were put back into crop production. Pheasant numbers dropped like a rock.

We are now several years into yet another change in government agricultural policy where taking acreage out of crop production is financially appealing to farmers once again, so bird numbers are on the rebound. Call counts went up 19 percent this spring from last year, according to DNR reports.

"In any given hunting season, 75 to 80 percent of the harvest is roosters that were hatched the previous spring," Cole said. "The whole key to predicting how a season will be comes in late August when all brood surveys are in and the numbers are processed."

According to Cole, our best areas for busting a cap on a longtail haven't changed that much from last year.