For those sportsmen interested in white-fronted geese, your best chance to kill one is in the Ballard County area, although Pritchert says Kentucky winters up to only 5,000 of these birds, and they are still considered "trophy geese" due to their lower numbers in our neck of the country.

Other species of blues and snows as well are mostly found in the Ballard area, and they too are pretty tough to hunt. You can do it, but it takes patience. Blues and snows are hard to decoy, but sometimes they will drop in with Canadas and let you get a shot.

"Geese, especially Canadas, aren't all concentrated in two or three places anymore. And it's causing goose hunters to have to change where they look, and be more flexible in setting up and learning new territory," said Pritchert.

Goose hunting isn't as predictable as it once was. These days, it takes a lot more scouting, thought and, in some cases, luck. It used to be you could more or less load up, go over to Ballard County, and hunt on a private farm or a lease area managed for waterfowl, and have a reasonably good chance of knocking down a couple of birds about anytime in January.

Sometimes that's still true, but not as often as it was a decade ago. Waterfowl behavior has changed a lot.

It's sort of ironic. While our state doesn't get the 150,000 or more migrant geese these days as it did 15 or 20 years ago on the Ballard and Sloughs WMAs, Kentucky hunters are now taking significantly more geese statewide. About 35,000 geese were harvested last season, with about 15 percent being Mississippi Valley Flyway birds. The rest were either resident or migrant giant Canadas.

There has been an increasing harvest trend over the past two decades overall. It's changed to where the migrant birds are the bonus, with the resident birds found more consistently. You have to play the odds now for best success.

When hard freezes occur to the north, or on the smaller bodies of water within Kentucky, they force the geese to move to rivers or large lakes. In the late season, keeping up with where open water is makes a big difference in your potential for success. When all the region's water is open, you'll find geese in a lot of different places, not just the handful of spots where they always used to be.

"There's a distinct difference in the types of areas, and the methods used, between hunting where most of the birds are migrant, versus where the area's is primarily populated with resident birds," explained Pritchert.