Photo by Holger Jensen.

White geese are infuriating birds. They're so unpredictable that few waterfowl hunters have anything kind to say about them.

You can get up at 2 a.m. and spend your predawn hours pounding hundreds of decoy stakes into frozen ground. Then listen to the din of thousands of birds taking off from a nearby lake and watch helplessly as they fly high overhead, well out of shotgun range, blithely ignoring your spread in order to land in a field only a few hundred yards away.

And if you switch fields at lunchtime when they're back on the lake for a midday break, they'll return to the field you just left behind. If you're lucky, a lone straggler or unwary juvenile might decide to drop in among your decoys. If you're luckier still, a small group of six or eight birds may sail in, fooled into thinking that your fluttering Texas rags are others of their ilk.

And then there are those magical days -- maybe one or two per season -- when contour-flying geese battling gale-force winds pass so low over your pit that you can swat them to your heart's content, until your shotgun jams from the swirling grit.

Such days are rare, however. Usually, you'll end up collecting hundreds of decoys, with only one or two geese to show for it. Or none at all.

FRUSTRATING, BUT FUN
Not many hunters are willing to put up with such frustration, at least not in Colorado. The Centennial State is on the western edge of white geese's northern and southern migrations, thus attracting far fewer of them than Kansas, Nebraska or the Dakotas.

However, some decent -- if not spectacular -- hunting for snow and Ross's geese can be enjoyed on Colorado's eastern plains. It begins two weeks before dark-goose season and ends fully two months later.

Not bad, for those of us who hate to put away our fowling pieces!

Three years ago, 100,000 white geese arrived at the Queens State Wildlife Area in southeast Colorado just before hunting season opened in the first week of November.

Jack Gentz, who runs the check station, waited in vain for hunters to show up as the birds denuded surrounding croplands.

By the time they arrived, most of the Ross's and snows had moved south to New Mexico and Texas.

In 2005, the opposite was true. A phalanx of hunters showed up on opening day, but only two white geese made an appearance. The big flocks came two weeks later when most of the hunters had given up and gone home.

In 2006, the geese again arrived early. The first snows were seen Oct. 8 in northeast Colorado and arrived at Queens two weeks before the white goose season opened on Nov. 4.

HUNTING QUEENS SWA
Are you interested in giving this kind of goose hunting a shot? Very few places are any better than Queens. It's the only agricultural land open to the general public that offers pit hunting for geese in feeding fields adjoining sanctuary lakes.

It also harbors the biggest concentrations of snow and Ross's geese that migrate south from the Canadian Arctic every winter. Many of these geese simply pass through the Centennial State on their way to Texas and Mexico. But a fair number spend their winters at Queens, fattening up on corn, milo and winter wheat before heading back north in the spring.

Given its abundance of white geese and free pits to hunt them from, one would think this SWA would be crowded with hunters. It's not.

Though the Colorado Division of Wildlife digs more than 40 pits every year, rarely are more than 10 of them occupied, even on weekends. And on a weekday, you may be alone.

The wildlife area covers more than 4,000 acres on both sides of U.S. Highway 287 between the towns of Eads and Lamar. Because it's a mix of state-owned land and fields leased from local farmers, the size of the SWA and the locations of pits may vary year to year. Some leases are not renewed, others are added on and crop rotation makes one field more productive than another.