GEESE MOVING IN, GOOD NEWS FOR UNTERS

OLIVE BRANCH, Ill. -- Billings Hunting Club shut down operations early Tuesday.

"We shot out," said Darold Billings.

Billings, owner and operator of the goose-hunting club alongside Route 3 near Horseshoe Lake Wildlife Refuge, looked over one of the nearby fields.

"Geese are everywhere," he said. "Tuesday has to be the best day we've had this year. We could have killed another 100 geese if we'd had the hunters."

The 14 hunters who braved the mixture of freezing rain, sleet and light snow early Tuesday each bagged their limit at Billings Club well before noon.

"Goose hunting has been good the past couple of weeks," said Billings. "It was a little slow the first two weeks of the season, but we have now harvested as many geese here as we killed the entire season in 1992-93, and we still have 18 days left."

Overall in the quota zone, the 1993-94 season closes Jan. 16, unless a quota of 30,600 is reached earlier.

"We may reach the quota this season," said Billings.

Larry Collins of Miller Hunting Club agreed.

"We had 22 hunters Tuesday morning, and by 11 a.m. the majority of them had shot out," said Collins. "We've had good hunter success over the past two weeks."

The latest harvest figures through Friday revealed that about 10,000 geese had been killed. That's an average of 350 geese a day in the quota zone.

The 1993-94 season had a late start, opening Nov. 27, and is in day 33 of its 51-day season.

A lot of new geese are in the Southern Illinois area, said Collins and Billings.

The latest census, taken Monday, revealed that more than 220,000 Canada geese -- 78,000 in the Crab Orchard Refuge Area in Jackson and Williamson counties, 31,000 at Horseshoe Lake in Alexander County, and 42,000 in Union County.

Other birds are scattered throughout the area, with 45,000 at Rend Lake, 12,500 at Ballard County Refuge across the Ohio River in Kentucky, and a few thousand in other areas.

"That means there are a lot of juvenile birds in the area," said Billings. "The younger birds are easier to hunt than the veteran old honkers, which have already experienced the ways of the hunter and in many cases can avoid them."

Goose hunting has been down in the quota zone the past couple of years.

The harvest total for 1992-93 was 17,255 birds in the four-county -- Alexander, Union, Williamson and Jackson -- Quota Zone area, said Anne Mueller of the Illinois Department of Conservation public affairs office in Springfield.

With an 84-day season that ended Jan. 31, that translates into 205 birds a day.

"The season opened Nov. 9 last year," said Billings. "We didn't have good hunting conditions until December because of warm weather. We didn't have the geese or the hunters."

Many clubs didn't open during the first week to 10 days of the 1992 season.

The 1991-92 season was better, with a harvest total of 28,000. That came on the heels of a 31,000-goose harvest in the quota zone during the 1990-91 season.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department is predicting a flight of 1.05 million birds in the Mississippi Flyway, down form the early prediction of 1.4 million of a year ago.

This year's spring survey in the Hudson Bay area of Canada showed a breeding population of 617,000 birds, which is down from the 900,000 considered optimum.

It was for this reason that the goose harvest quota was reduced in Illinois. The majority of Illinois geese come from the Hudson Bay area.

The Illinois state quota for this season is 61,300, down from the 79,000 of last year, when hunters harvested 76,700 geese in Illinois.

The season and quota were also reduced in the quota zone, which historically provides high hunter-success rates. The season was decreased from 84 days from last season to 51 days, and the quota was lowered from 39,500 to 30,600 birds.