Photo by Andy Martin.

The faint honk of a Canada goose ended our small talk and turned our attention to the skies. Peeking out the top of the blind, I could see a distant line of geese on the horizon, just off to our left. As I began to call to the geese, my hunting partner stuck the homemade goose flag out of our blind and waved it aggressively in an effort to imitate geese landing in the field.

The combination proved effective as the short line of 10 to 12 geese banked and headed in our direction.

As they neared our blind, the calling between the flock and us intensified. Soon it became obvious that the birds were committed to coming in for a closer look. By the time they realized that something wasn't right with our flock of plastic decoys, the lid to the blind had flipped open, and the bark of shotguns echoed across the field of corn stubble.

Of course, those big birds are never quite as easy to hit as it seems. When the smoke cleared, only two birds lay among the decoys as a result of our efforts.

While we took only those two birds that day, dozens more made their way by us that morning. It was a hunt that one would expect at Ballard or the Sloughs wildlife management areas (WMAs) when conditions are right.

This hunt, however, occurred in the central part of the state, just a stone's throw away from Louisville.

Hunts like the one just described are more common across much of the Bluegrass State, thanks to an explosion in what Rocky Pritchert, Migratory Game Bird Program coordinator for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR), calls "temperate nesting birds."

These are giant Canada geese that make their home in Kentucky and our surrounding states.

"We are trying to get away from the term 'resident geese,' " said Pritchert. Many of the giant Canada geese harvested here do not necessarily live in Kentucky year 'round.

"We know there is one segment of our population that migrates up to Hudson Bay every year to molt," the biologist stated. "Then they return to this area in August or September."

Regardless of what you call them, the population of giant Canadas in the area has exploded over the last 15 years to the point that Pritchert estimates that some 50,000 giant Canada geese now call Kentucky home.

The increasing number of local geese has been good news to waterfowl hunters, since milder winters and changing migration patterns have resulted in fewer geese from the traditional Mississippi Valley Population (MVP) and Southern James Bay Population (SJBP) making their way south to Kentucky.

These geese are finding everything they need farther north in Illinois and Michigan. Only when the weather up north gets really cold and nasty do we see the customary push of geese that once made western Kentucky such a popular wingshooting destination -- and that just doesn't seem to happen as often as it did just a decade ago.

Despite the drop in migrating goose numbers, the increasing number of temperate nesting birds has actually caused Kentucky's overall Canada goose harvest to increase over the last 15 years. In 1990, for example, hunters harvested 11,500 Canada geese in Kentucky and of those, only 2,400 were giant Canada geese.

Fifteen years later in 2005, hunters were able to harvest approximately 35,000 Canada geese, including 22,000 temperate nesting giants. That 200 percent increase in Canada goose harvest is the direct result of an exploding temperate nesting goose population in the central and eastern two-thirds of the state.

MONITORING EFFORTS
In an effort to monitor their burgeoning population, the KDFWR has been banding birds since the first geese were released back in the mid-1980s. This annual monitoring process involves capturing geese on various sites across the state, recording band information on the Canadas that have bands, and banding those birds that don't.