Geese, sandhills, ice/snow, perch: Change week, Chicago outdoors

Thousands of Canada geese obscured, at first, hundreds of mallards feeding in a picked cornfield by an industrial park outside of Manteno Sunday in the snow.

They were part of a wondrously changing week around Chicago outdoors with everything from a historic migration to the start of ice fishing to a spike in perch fishing.

The mallards will keep migrating on. The Canada geese are another matter.

One reason fresh geese arrived in northern Kankakee County was snow depth. Much of Lake, McHenry and northern Cook counties received 8 inches of snow, the magic number to move geese.

But modern geese have learned not to go far. Kankakee County, with snow cover in the 3- to 4-inch range, was far enough. I’m sure Grundy, Iroquois, LaSalle and Livingston counties had similar arrivals of thousands on geese in the last few days.

The geese were one part of a massive modern migration.

Sandhill cranes poured through by the tens of thousands in the last week in a historic push. My first inkling came the afternoon of Dec. 7.

“For the last hour, I have had 100 flocks of cranes flying over non-stop every few minutes,’’ Ron Wozny emailed from the North Side.

From emails, texts and messages I received and similar reports on IBET, the birders network, the migration peaked on Thursday, but kept going into this week. I don’t know how to quantify how many came through, but I’m comfortable calling it historic.

The migration showed in other ways, too. Braidwood Lake, the cooling lake in southwest Will County, had a slow duck season, until Thursday and Friday when 161 and 141 ducks were bagged, respectively.

The trigger was the weather change.

Ice fishing began, a bit late, around the area, primarily in the backwaters of the Chain O’Lakes and such shallow southern Wisconsin lakes as Camp, Obviously, with the snow cover, extreme caution is in order.

“Snow is going to insulate this ice a little bit, but I think it will be cold enough to penetrate it,’’ said Greg Dickson, proprietor of Triangle Sports and Marine in Antioch, Tuesday. “I have to say our season has officially started.’’

Then there’s wild knowledge. Staff at William W. Powers State Recreation Area on Chicago’s Southeast Side by Monday saw coyote tracks on the ice beginning to set up at Wolf Lake.

And perch fishing picked up, both in the numbers of perch and jumbos; likely related to more normal water temperatures for December in the 30s on Lake Michigan.

But there’s always an outlier in the outdoors.

Pete Lamar fished a discharge Saturday afternoon on the Fox River.

“Nothing big, but a real mixed bag: smallmouth, largemouth, walleye and crappie, one of each,’’ he emailed. “They may not have reached 24 inches in aggregate, but I was fly fishing in December with snow starting to fly, so no complaints.’’

No complaints, the way to take what the outdoors offers.

HUNTING: Duck hunting in Illinois’ central zone, which ends Tuesday, will lose only a few days to ice-up. . . . I will post deer harvest numbers here online for muzzleloader deer when figures become available.

STRAY CAST: Why does it feel like the Sox are retrieving a Baby 1-Minus against the current while the Cubs are burping a popper down a current seam?