SPRINGFIELD – Illinois has purchased 547 additional acres of natural landscape for preservation, including some of the nation’s richest deer-hunting territory in the western part of the state and a colossal parcel of wildlife refuge northwest of Chicago, Gov. Pat Quinn announced Wednesday.

The Quinn administration used $2.8 million in capital construction program money to add plots in four Illinois counties to the state’s 500,000-acre inventory of public lands.

The largest chunk is 410 acres, costing $1.8 million, in Pike County in western Illinois, which the Democratic governor called the “national capital for deer hunting,” but which has almost no publicly accessible hunting grounds.