John Case remembers when he used to hunt ducks in marshland just northwest of the Chicago city limits. The land eventually became part of the Kennedy Expressway.
So he moved west to hunt on farmland in Elk Grove Township. The land was turned into an industrial park.
Case moved farther west, deep into Kane and McHenry Counties, to rural property near the hamlets of Marengo and Hampshire.
Today, as housing subdivisions and shopping malls fill open space in the collar counties, Case feels that even those enclaves are threatened.
“You can still hunt in the Marengo area. But the Hampshire area has gotten to the point now you’d be hard pressed to find a place you could hunt pheasant,” said Case, 71, of Park Ridge, a former outdoor writer for the Chicago Daily News and a former outdoor editor for CBS Radio.
Each November, as the fall hunting season kicks into high gear, hunters take to the fields of Illinois with firearms or bows and arrows seeking a variety of game, from deer, squirrels and rabbits to duck, quail and pheasant.
But hunting in the six-county Chicago area is diminishing each year, as open fields are replaced with buildings and roads.
As land becomes more valuable, private property owners increasingly are selling off land leased for licensed hunting preserves, created specifically for the sport.
On such preserves the natural habitat for wildlife is maintained, and privately raised game is regularly released to replenish that taken by hunters who pay for such services. Even there, hunters find themselves under attack from residents of new subdivisions, many of whom say they didn’t find out until after moving that hunters would be in the neighborhood.
Licensed hunting preserves are plentiful across Illinois, about 200 in all, according to the Department of Conservation. But in the Chicago area there has been a gradual erosion of the number of preserves in the last 20 years, said Terry Musser, an official with the conservation department.
Musser, who tracks the number of open preserves, reports the following: McHenry County has about 22 preserves, the most in the area, down from a peak of about 34 in the 1970s; Lake County has three, down from a high of 25; Kane and Will Counties only have a handful; and there are no known preserves in Du Page or Cook Counties.
“We did have one around 127th and Harlem (in Palos Heights), a small club. It folded up about five years ago,” Case said. “The last time I was by there, there were houses on the property.”
There also are a few pockets of private property that still are used for hunting, but they too are getting scarce, according to the conservation department. Locations include small sections in the Barrington area; near Bartlett and Wayne in Kane County; the Lemont area; and all along the southern edge of Cook County, the department said.
Musser said the Department of Conservation does allow people to hunt on state land in the Chicago area. The best-known locations are the Des Plaines Conservation Area in Will County and Chain o’ Lakes State Park in Lake County.
The department also is expanding hunting in the Kankakee River State Park in Will and Kankakee Counties and the Silver Springs State Park in Kendall County. In both areas, the state releases pheasants for hunting during the legal season.
And the sprawling former Joliet Army Arsenal wilderness in Will County opened for hunting this year for the first time.
But a number of hunting preserve operators in recent years have been squeezed out of the collar counties and are leapfrogging about 50 to 100 miles to preserves in Iroquois, Ogle, Lee, Bureau, and La Salle Counties or even farther, Musser said.
Those who still find places to hunt in the Chicago area sometimes encounter hostility from residents of new subdivisions.
“Some people did not realize when they purchased their property that a hunting club has probably been in existence there for 20 years,” said Capt. Howard Brewer, who is in charge of conservation department’s law enforcement for the collar counties.
“Some people don’t care for gunshots in the early morning during the waterfowl season. Some people don’t care for hunting,” Brewer said. “They will say, `Nobody told me there was a hunt club out here.’ “
In Lake County, the conservation department sometimes gets complaints about duck blinds being too close to homes, Brewer said.
McHenry County has more state-licensed hunting preserves than any other county in the state. Eastern McHenry County generates the most complaints from homeowners about hunters because of new subdivisions going up, Brewer said.
In the 1960s, the McHenry County Board wanted to license hunting preserves and decide which ones could exist. But the state Department of Conservation took control of licensing before the county proposal moved forward, Case said.
The issue resurfaced last year in a dispute between landowners and the Bull Valley Hunting Club in McHenry County, Case said.
“The landowners wanted control out there, saying it was disturbing their peace,” Case said. “But the hunting club was there long before.”
Even with the increased mingling of hunting and development, reports of injuries involving non-hunters in Illinois are rare, said Sheila White, safety education administrator for the Department of Conservation.
White said she examined every hunting accident reported in the state from 1987 through 1992, the years in which the state began keeping narratives of hunting accidents, and found only one accident involving a non-hunter as the victim. Authorities said that 1991 incident may not have been a hunting accident and charged the shooter with murder.
The legal distances that hunters must keep from homes, unless the resident or residents allow them to hunt closer, is 100 yards if a hunter is using a bow and arrow or buckshot, and 300 yards if a hunter is using a rifle, according to conservation department rules.
Non-hunters think of a typical hunter as a man with a rifle, but the great preponderance of hunting in Illinois is with shotguns for game birds, Musser said. Buckshot usually travels less than 100 yards, Musser said, and most game birds, rabbits and geese are shot within 30 yards of the hunter.
