Umm, the relationship between the pheasant population and freeways is simply that it was ths 60s. Didn't the soil bank program not last longer than the 60s or so? Also, I feel it necessary to comment, though I hate the "slicing and dicing" just as much as many others on this forum, that the areas of the cities in Detroit have more pheasants than many other areas of southern MI. Why? Letting the land grow wild with weeds is key IMO. Not cutting down or cropping every acre of land is what is necessary. I'm sure that the poor eating cats and raccoons probably helps too.0th the # of birds - that's just the macro-realities of people vs. pheasants. When the freeways were built in the eastern states, they unleashed a huge march of people from BIG urban areas into farm country, slicing, dicing, and hacking up large expanses of pheasant country into useless bits. There is a direct relationship between the building of freeways in high population(eastern) states to the massive decline in bird #'s during the mid-sixties.