OUTDOOR flAMERICA 
 
and predators are often responsible for the decrease 
of upland game birds, but by and large in agricul- 
tural communities the presence or absence of thickets, 
hedgerows, ungrazed , oodlots, marshes and other 
coverts, and the supply, or lack of it, of winter food, 
are of equal or greater importance than hunting. 
This is particularly true of prairie chickens although 
we must not minimize the toll of excessive shooting. 
In a certain part of southwestern Wisconsin there 
were many prairie chickens twenty years ago. "You 
could hear them crowing everywhere in the spring, 
 
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.ent the local 
s. Twenty 
today the 
ingf stalks 
that the 
forest in 
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mas almost 
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airie chicken 
lerritt L. Jones, 
Bureau, and long 
es and his friends con- 
the food supplies which 
 
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disappeared with the abandonment of farms in the sand and marsh 
district. 
In 1928, three of these permanent feeding stations were estab- 
lished. Unused land was plowed tip and sowed to buckwheat. 
Part of this matured grain was cut and stacked; part left uncut. 
Prairie chickens came to the feeding stations as soon as the buck- 
wheat was ripe, fed upon the grain until the snow covered the 
buckwheat. stalks over, and then when the stacked grain was 
opened up at the time of natural food shortage, chickens and sharp 
tailed grouse flocked in from all the surrounding country. Mr. 
Irv Van Wormer, a sportsman who assisted in this project with