Weather . . . or Not
Goose hunters also need to understand that very cold weather will not move the geese out of northern Illinois, but it will affect their daily habits.

When the temperatures drop much below 20 degrees (and certainly when the thermometer reads 0 or lower), a goose usually figures it is best to hunker down, conserve energy and wait for better days. I have seen a flock of geese sit on a frozen pond for three straight days in sub-zero weather and never leave it. But when the weather broke and the birds took flight, hunting was gangbusters!

When, and if, the geese do decide to fly out to feed, it will be late in the morning, perhaps as late as 11 a.m., and they probably will all come at once. This makes for some very tough hunting, as there are just too many eyes in the sky. Some are going to figure out what you are up to. Your best shots -- following your best calling routines and decoy spreads -- will be taken at the small flocks that precede the later large flight of geese, or those that trail after the big flight.

The frigid conditions associated with many days of goose hunting in northern Illinois also dictate how you use your decoys.

Observe a flock of geese on the ground in very cold temperatures and you will note most of them are huddled up with their heads under a wing. This is how they stay warm. Your decoy spread should mimic this behavior, so use shell decoys predominantly and cluster them in a tight group, with only a few standing sentries scattered about. Do not call or wave flags under these conditions.

What will move the geese is a deep snow of 5 inches or more that buries their food for more than four days. After the snow falls, the geese will often just sit it out, sometimes right in the feeding fields, and wait for a thaw. When cold conditions persist, and the birds get hungry enough, they will suddenly all decide to take a road trip.

Looking for a Meal Ticket
When the geese do go, it is a remarkable sight because it becomes a mass migration of nearly all the birds that have been fasting. For the better part of a day, the sky is filled with long lines of noisy southbound honkers. They are excited and hungry, and they are doing something about it. You haven’t got a “snowball’s chance” to lure any of these flocks to your spreads, but you may get lucky on a few local flocks before they reach airliner altitude.

Centrally Located
This huge force of geese will wing its way south only as far as it takes them to find bare ground and food. Typically, their landing sites will be somewhere in Illinois’ Central Zone, but that will be determined by how far downstate the snowstorm traveled. They may light just south of Interstate 80, or the weather may chase the geese all the way down to Illinois’ Southern Quota Zone.

Wherever the goose flights decide to come down, local hunters will be dancing in the streets! For the next two or three days the fields will be alive with “new birds.” These geese are ravenous, and they have no idea where danger lays -- the perfect combination for memorable goose hunting.

So, you see, goose hunting in the Central Zone in January is quite dependent on weather conditions in the Northern Zone. And, “if you snooze,” proverbially, “you lose.” When weather up north moderates, the same huge flights of Canadas that generated excitement in blinds across the Central Zone will be gone as fast as they came. Some will probably remain near the big cooling lakes just south of I-80, but most will simply return from where they came. Moreover, hunting the local flocks, which aren’t numerous or large, is difficult at best because these birds have been heavily pressured for two months and are reaching the “unkillable” stage.