MONTHLY WILDLIFE RESEARCH LETTER 
Vol. 1, No. 10 
Page 3 
A captive female raccoon that has been given periodic oral doses of 
white lead paint since June died of an accident on October 21. At that time 
she was apparently in excellent health and was fat. Upon autopsy her liver 
had 2h micrograms of lead per gram of tissue. This raises doubt as to whether 
the concentrations of lead (6-10 micrograms per gram of tissue) previously 
reported in the livers of sick and dead raccoons actually were high enough to 
have caused death. Other animals are being treated to resolve the question. 
W-61-R-2 F. Greeley, J. Ellis 
During October final arrangements were made for calculation of town¬ 
ship pheasant population indices based on the data gathered by rural mail 
carriers during 1957-1958. The raw data from six counts have been placed on 
IBM punch cards, and the calculations will be done by digital computor. 
Cards have been punched with the per cent of soil association areas 
occupying each of 1,271 townships in 76 counties comprising the pheasant range. 
These data will be used to compute pheasant population indices from each soil 
association. 
Field work on the Neoga and Bellmont areas during October was directed 
toward determining the sex ratio of pheasants prior to the opening of the hunting 
season. At Neoga, in 19 man-hours of walking, 2l+ pheasants were observed 
(1.26 pheasants per man-hour). Eleven of the birds were cocks giving a sex 
ratio of 85 cocks:100 hens. 
At Bellmont, 119 observations of pheasants (296 cocks:100 hens) were 
made, although many of the birds were observed several times. During 21 man¬ 
hours of walking, 10 pheasants (233 cocks: 100 hens) were flushed (0.1+8 birds 
per man-hour). 
Wide-Row Corn P. Vohs 
The completed rough draft of the wide-row corn paper is being edited. 
Revisions will be initiated as soon as the editing is completed. An article 
on wide-row corn is being prepared for the Business Bulletin, a Southern Illinois 
University publication. 
