Snow geese stop in local counties as they slowly migrate north

"They are just kind of hanging out right now," Forbey said. "I have seen a lot this year."

After living in southern coastal marshes, bays, wet grasslands and fields, the flocks are now flying north to their breeding grounds on the Arctic tundra.

According to the National Geographic, "Snow geese are known for their white plumage, but many of them are actually darker, gray-brown birds known as blue geese."

The number of the geese seen locally depends on the weather.

"The weather changes how they migrate and if it pushes one way or another," Forbey said. "Sometimes we see a lot and others just a few but this year we have seen quite a few."

There has been larger numbers of geese seen in Knox, Daviess and Gibson counties recently.

The geese can cause a bit of a mess on the sidewalks surrounding the pond at Eastside Park in Washington.

"We have to clean the sidewalks with a sidewalk cleaner," Kip Kelley, the superintendent for Washington Park and Recreation, said. "We always get quite a few though this time of year. They like that the water doesn't completely freeze over in the big pond."

The geese tend to hang out around rivers and ponds. The diet of a snow goose consists of grasses and grains which they find in fields while they are damp from snow.

"They look for grain fields, mainly the corn fields, and they will feed on the split grain that is left behind," Forbey said.

So with the sun shining during the day and thawing the ground, the snow geese are searching for their next meal.

"When it freezes up, you don't see a lot because they have got to have some water somewhere," Forbey said. "But once things start breaking up a little bit, they start migrating out to start looking for fields to feed in."

Flocks of snow geese should start decreasing by the end of the month.

"About March they will start heading north again," Forbey said.