Snow Goose Migration Update

Snow Goose Migration Update

The back and forth between winter and spring has continued the past couple weeks. The leading edge has been back and forth a couple times, but now currently resides near the South Dakota/Nebraska border with large numbers of geese extending back south to northwest Missouri. South and east of there, numbers are very scattered.

The snow last week pushed the leading edge of adults back south out of South Dakota, but now that the snow has melted and water has opened back up, they’re right back where they were and are ready to make another jump north in the coming days. Reports out of Nebraska are that there has never been this number of snow geese around. Nearly every body of water is holding geese and not just some of them…lots of them. The Monday survey as Loess Bluffs reported nearly three quarters of a million snow geese. Back across the rest of Missouri and Illinois, few pockets of birds remain.

Ten days ago there was good separation between adults and younger geese, but it now seem that many of them have bunched back up with the warmth in the south and the cold up north. Everything has converged the past few days across Nebraska. If you’re looking for where the younger geese reside, there might not be as define of a line as normal. Juvenile numbers could highly vary from flock to flock for now.

The Week Ahead

A warmup is in store for much of the area the snow goose migration currently resides. With much of the smaller waters still frozen across the Dakotas, it’s looking like much of the migration might hug the Missouri River with that providing some of the only open water around. The snow line should fall back north quite a bit the next couple days and those geese eager to get back to the breeding grounds will be right there with it by next week.