VJ^ 
NkioIAL HISTORY SURVEY 
MAY 51980 
LIBRARY 
MONTHLY WILDLIFE RESEARCH LETTER 
Illinois Federal Aid Projects W- 66 -R and W-87-R 
Department of Conservation and Natural History Survey, Cooperating 
Glen C. Sanderson and Eva Steger, Editors 
Urbana, Illinois 
April, 1980 
Vol. 23, No. 4 
Manipulation of Pheasant H ab?tat - W- 66 -R R. E. Warner 
Pheasant nests have been counted annually on Ford County Management Unit 
(FCMU) since 1973* Numbers of nests have been recorded for 68 seeded roadside 
plots .25 mile in length; roadside plots were randomly selected for searching 
after dividing the FCMU into 4, 4-square-mile blocks. 
Over the 7 years of nest searches, pheasant numbers and numbers of nests 
found on roadsides have declined as hay and small-grain fields have been replaced 
by row crops. An important question for roadside management is: to what extent 
do pheasants nest on roadsides where there are no nearby hay or small-grain 
fields, or both? 
Preliminary analysis shows that frequency of nesting on roadside plots has 
not been different (P >.20) among the 4 blocks from which roadsides were randomly 
► selected, or among road types adjacent to seeded vegetation (P>.80). The type 
of road--dirt, gravel, or blacktop--is assumed to be a crude indicator of 
vehicular traffic. 
Encoding of data is nearly complete and will facilitate multi variant analysis 
of variance tests for differences in frequency of nesting related to distance 
from the roadside plots to the nearest hayfield, small-grain field, and farmstead. 
Additional covariants in the analysis will be width of roadside plot and proximity 
of each plot to the roadside management area. 
These analyses may be important in selecting roadside management areas. 
Ecology and Management of Squirrel s - W- 66 -R C. M. Nixon, 
L. P. Hansen 
Although social behavior has been implicated as a density regulating mechanism 
in numerous rodent populations, its role in regulating the abundance of fox 
squirrels is largely unknown. The low and constant densities at which fox squirrels 
are generally found, however, suggest that some intrinsic mechanism may act to 
maintain stable populations. 
To gain insight into the social behavior of fox squirrels, we evaluated the 
dispersion of animals in 2 wood lots near Danville. From livet rapping data we 
calculated an index of home-range overlap within and among 4 sex-age categories: 
juveniles, adult males, breeding females, and nonbreeding adult females. 
