Snow goose hunting is like buying a house: location, location, location. Good rules of thumb: Green winter wheat draws more geese than corn stubble, and milo sometimes trumps them both.

Queens has four lakes fed by a ditch from the Arkansas River, but the water levels depend on weather and irrigation demands.

Several years of drought had emptied Lower Queens Reservoir. Upper Queens went dry in the summer of 2006, but was replenished by a winter blizzard that dropped enough snow to give it a partial refill.

It is not a sanctuary lake and can be hunted right up to the water's edge or by boat on the lake itself with floater decoys, which are particularly effective during the extended spring conservation season. Nee Noshe and Nee Gronda are both sanctuary lakes, protected by firing lines that hunters cannot cross.

Each has firing-line pits that require no decoys and can be quite effective on windy days, depending which way the geese fly. But hunters with decoys do best in pits located in feeding fields farther away from the lakes, if they pick the right field.

Most white geese spend their nights on Nee Noshe and Nee Gronda, and during the day, there is a fair amount of goose traffic between the two lakes. But where they feed is a crapshoot that even good scouting can't always pin down. Your best bet is to see where they go in the morning, check again in the afternoon after their midday break on the water, and hope they'll return to the same fields the next day.

Gentz, the amiable pit boss who runs the check station at Queens, will tell you how many geese there are on the water. But he won't venture a guess as to which way they'll fly. Pits must be reserved in person between 4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. and claimed by 5 a.m. the next morning.

Small-game licenses with HIP numbers and waterfowl stamps must be left at the check station while hunting. All birds must be brought back whole for weighing and species-check at the end of the hunt. You can reach Gentz at (719) 438-5755.

OVERABUNDANCE?
Wildlife biologists estimate there are least 6 million lesser snow geese in North America. Add Ross's geese, their smaller cousins, and the number of white geese could exceed 8 million. Mature Ross's geese weigh 3 to 4 pounds, while the bigger snows weigh 5 to 6 pounds.

They are divided into four distinct populations. The white geese seen here are part of the Western Central Flyway population, which leaves its summer nesting grounds in the Canadian Arctic to winter in Kansas, southeastern Colorado, New Mexico, the Texas panhandle and northern Mexico.

The white goose population has grown tremendously over the past 40 years -- and may be still growing, as Canadian biologists continue to find new nesting colonies.

Already, coastal marsh habitats, notably those in southern and western Hudson Bay, have been severely degraded by staging and nesting geese. Continued growth of the mid-continent population is predicted to cause even greater damage.

Over-hunting in the early 1900s nearly decimated white geese. Wildlife managers responded by closing seasons and restricting bag limits, while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service used funds from the federal duck stamp program to purchase additional refuges. That, plus a rich and plentiful diet of readily available agricultural crops such as rice, corn, milo and winter wheat along their migration routes, helped snow and Ross's goose populations rebound.

Global warming, especially in the Arctic, lessened the frequency of periodic breeding failures. Wildlife agencies, accustomed to protecting the birds, found themselves encouraging more hunting to prevent the geese from destroying their habitat.

In spring, the geese pull grasses up by the roots, stripping the ground bare. This leads to erosion, increased evaporation of soil moisture and an increase in soil salinity that prevents re-growth of vegetation. Along the west coast of Hudson Bay, it's estimated that nearly one third of the coastal salt marsh habitat has been destroyed, while another third is seriously damaged.