A few years back some friends of mine and I found a roost on some property we were hunting. Just five miles away was a roost of probably 30,000, but this one was in the neighborhood of 5,000. That's still a lot of geese.

Our first attempt at taking the birds was a dismal failure. Two afternoons in a row we saw geese feeding in one particular field, and assumed they were coming from our roost, since it was only three-quarters of a mile away. That was a big mistake.

When we arrived in the early afternoon, a few scattered snows were in the field; the big concentration hadn't arrived yet. We set up on the end of the field nearest the roost right along a thick line of tallow trees that ran north to south. We had about 100 decoys set up just in front of us, but the goal was to shoot the geese as they flew over the treeline.

At around 7 a.m. the geese started flocking to the field, but they came from the other direction; we ended up shooting six geese. If they'd come in the way we'd thought they would, they'd have flown right over us within easy shooting range.

What happened? Well, the geese weren't from the roost we had scouted, but from the big one down the road. The landowner told us that he'd seen the geese get up from our roost and feed in a field a mile to the other side of the roost. Probably 1,000 geese were there, he said, and the rest seemed to be scattered in neighboring fields. We were on the opposite side of the concentration of birds that we wanted to hunt.

Our mistake lay in not taking the time to watch which fields that the geese from our roost were flying to. In many cases you'll have one huge roost and then another smaller one or a few smaller ones nearby. Roost hunting is all about hunting flyways and flight times.

You have to be especially wary of depending on your decoys to help you score on large flocks of geese. Sometime this month, geese will begin moving in large flocks. Oh, there'll be plenty of small ones -- but you'll usually find thousands of geese in a flock flying in unison, and that's very tempting for hunters to pursue.

"One of the biggest mistakes a goose hunter can make is to focus all of his efforts on that one big flock. You are talking about a couple of thousand eyes looking down at you," said diehard goose hunter Keith Robicheaux of Breaux Bridge.

According to Robicheaux, the program to follow in these circumstances is planning that everything will work entirely against you.

"If you're dead set on hunting those huge flocks of geese," he said, "you have to basically plan for everything to go wrong. Start by forgetting about impressing them with a huge spread of decoys. You can do just as good with a handful and maybe not intimidate them."

And that's exactly right. Hunting a few years ago with an outfitter along the Texas-Louisiana border, I spent two hours along with the rest of the party in setting up well over 1,000 decoys. We had it all: Life-sized, magnum, shells, rags, kites -- you name it, we had it out. Then just before dawn, the outfitter moved us about 200 yards away from the decoys.

One of the hunters on the trip said, "I'm sure you're aware that our shotguns will not reach that far."