The Illinois pheasant forecast for the season we are about to begin looks even brighter than 2005 at this juncture. Good news. Just like your kid taking second in the high hurdles at a track meet.

I still have a red ribbon from my high school track days. That's pretty impressive for a guy at age 55 who can still keep up with a Lab on a hot scent. Never mind that there were only two of us running that race back in 1965. I would have beat the kid from Lanark had I known you still had to run a few yards after clearing that last hurdle.

The point is, the "red ribbon" year that pheasant hunters are likely to experience in the months ahead will fall short of 1995, the last year when Prairie State pheasant hunters put over 300,000 roosters in the game bag. Why was '95 such a good year? Because government policies resulted in substantial tracts of land enrolled in CRP programs in Illinois. Pheasant numbers are driven by habitat. Available habitat is driven by economics. Economic conditions are dictated by the federal government.

So how could Hanna Banana bring me 54 pheasants from primarily hunts on public lands last year, with every reason to expect similar results in the season ahead? Back to economics. The cost of farmland in northern Iowa and North Dakota is much less than in prime agricultural areas of Illinois. In these states, it makes better economic sense for farmers to let the government pay them not to keep land in crop production.

You can't blame an Iowa farmer for sticking his back 40 into CRP. Some say "Iowa" is an acronym for "I Owe the World an Apology." Don't blame the northern Iowa farmers. They will probably allow you to hunt for free if you tire of hunting public lands. There is even more public land, more CRP participation and more pheasants in North Dakota because land prices are even cheaper.

It should come as no surprise that many wildlife-oriented Illinois DNR employees like to go hunting on their days off. Several of these DNR employees are close personal friends of mine who love to hunt pheasants. Although they work diligently within the system to provide the best hunting opportunities here in Illinois, leisure time is spent in neighboring states where both economic conditions and public attitudes are more conducive to good hunting opportunities.

I shot just six ringnecks in Illinois last year. Every one of them came from my brother-in-law's farm over in Jo Daviess County. There are several roosters living behind my rural home in Winnebago County where more than half of my five country acres is switchgrass. Although my acreage and my neighbor's is zoned for agricultural use, we share an unwritten agreement not to hunt these birds, hoping that our stewardship efforts will eventually result in a huntable population of pheasants over the next few years. The future looks bright in this regard because the local habitat is in blocks rather than linear "filter strips" in which pheasants are more prone to predation by a free radical component called coyotes.