Goose hunting in Iowa couldn't be better this year. Overpopulation among Canada geese has yet to create problems such as other states are experiencing, but there are plenty to go around, according to Guy Zenner, the waterfowl and wetlands program leader for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in Clear Lake.

According to Zenner, native Hawkeye Canadas can at times number 100,000 birds -- a figure, remember, that excludes migrants. That's a lot of geese! So here's a look at some of our best areas for bagging one this winter.

RED ROCK WA
"The good news for hunters -- and the major change this year -- is that the big area that was closed around Red Rock Reservoir is going to be open to hunting this year," said Zenner. "Initially there will probably be a pretty good harvest. The first day or two, the Canadas will be fooled -- but they're not stupid. They'll pick up on the fact that things have changed."

According to Zenner, 100 square miles of formerly closed waterfowl refuge will now be open to Hawkeye waterfowlers, with the exception of two inviolate waterfowl refuges that have been in place since the reservoir was impounded. No special regulations will be in effect.

"The Red Rock refuge is located near the suburbs of Des Moines," explained Zenner, "and was an experiment that didn't do as well as biologists had hoped. The refuge was supposed to coax the Canadas out of the urban areas and into the refuge. Canada geese are very sensitive to hunting pressure, and Red Rock had a lot of boating and other activity that probably kept the geese from settling in."

Scrapping the refuge status of this marshy area will make field-hunting an option this year where there was little land open last season.

The Red Rock Wildlife Area covers over 28,000 acres in Warren and Polk counties. The 19,000-acre flood-control reservoir is the largest in the state. The area is two miles south of Carlisle on 165th Place.

Additional information is available from the Red Rock Management Unit at (515) 961-0716.

ELK CREEK MARSH
"December is primarily field-hunting time, as most lakes and marshes are iced over in north-central Iowa," reported Greg Hanson, wildlife management biologist with Rice Lake Management Unit. "Occasionally there are still geese using Elk Creek Marsh in Worth County, since Elk Creek usually remains open for a few hundred feet below the dams."

Other areas too hold promise, noted Hanson. "Geese congregate on the Rice Lake Refuge," he said, "and on the rivers in larger towns like the Winnebago River in Forest City and Mason City and the Cedar River in Charles City and Osage. Most field-hunting is done on private land, but if the rivers are not frozen, some of the state and county areas along the Winnebago or Cedar and sometimes the Shellrock can provide shots at the geese."

According to Zenner, waterfowlers in the northern part of the state will have local birds filtering out from the closed zones and back into the outlying public shooting areas. The big marshes have good goose production and supply the numbers that hunters like to see. Telemetry and banding studies have shown that birds will move back out of the protected zones and into their summer feeding grounds, where hunters can tag them.