Photo by Gerald Pabst.

Once upon a time January goose hunting could have been summed up in just four words: “Southern Illinois Quota Zone.” Nearly every respectable Canada goose in the Mississippi Valley Flyway was living large in one of the three major refuges to be found there. In fact, I wouldn’t have trusted any goose that didn’t live in the Quota Zone.

However, who would ever have guessed this basic migratory pattern of the wild goose could be completely altered in a short period of time? Actually, the same thing occurred just 60 years earlier.

Few of today’s goose hunters were even around back then, but the geese had been winging their way southward for decades upon decades down the major river systems of Illinois and the rest of the Midwest all the way to the Gulf of Mexico’s northern coast in Louisiana and Mississippi. They ate grasses along the riverbanks, moving south as cold weather crept from the north, killing off the seasonal grasses or covering them with snow.

Then, back around 1830, a major earthquake jiggled the Mississippi River out of its banks, leaving southern Illinois’ Horseshoe Lake in its wake. The lake became Illinois’ first major waterfowl refuge, and the geese began to forget the lands and waters of the more southern portions of their traditional flyway.

In the late 1930s and early ‘40s, goose hunting became so popular and was so good in Illinois that the Mississippi Valley population of Canada geese was nearly wiped out. As a result, President Harry S. Truman closed the goose-hunting season in 1944-45 and ordered the vast Crab Orchard Federal Arsenal to be converted into a wildlife refuge. In 1951, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources created the three-mile-long Union County State Fish and Wildlife Area midway between Crab Orchard and the nearby Horseshoe Lake State Fish and Wildlife Area.

These refuges provided abundant food and safety for the migrating geese, and their annual flights farther south were a thing of the past. The migration had been altered, permanently. Each fall hundreds of thousands of wild geese poured down the flyway to fill the “big three” southern Illinois refuges, a pattern that appeared to be set in stone. Today, wild Canada geese don’t have a clue that there is life south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

But by the late 1980s, Mother Nature played the global-warming card, biologists introduced giant strain Canada geese into northern Illinois, and farmers embraced no-till farming methods that left tons of waste grain on the surfaces of their fields.

These dynamics further altered the migratory pattern of the wild Canada geese. Lured by open water, abundant food, safe roosting areas, and the companionship of their fellow kind, the southern migration now went no farther than Illinois’ northern tier of counties. What appeared to many to be an amazing natural phenomenon, in reality, was nothing more than wild creatures adapting to their changing environment.

In a way, the reaction of the geese to their altered habitat may give us some insight as to what could happen if the worst scenario of global warming occurs. For example, if the Arctic ice shelf melts, is it conceivable the seals will become more shore oriented, and the polar bears will simply hunt them there? Why does everything have to die just because current conditions no longer prevail? Somehow, the seals and bears survived mile-thick ice during the ice ages, didn’t they?

Combine all the factors said and unsaid that can, do and could affect the migration of Canada geese in and through Illinois, and you find the vast majority of the region’s Canadas now winter in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. By January, a small portion of those birds might move into the extreme northern tier of the Central Zone, but the only significant concentrations of Canadas in Illinois are found at a few large, open-water sites near Peoria. Most prominent among these are the power plant cooling lake operated by Central Illinois Light Company (CILCO) and the Chicago Metropolitan Sanitary District ponds.