Mike Raahauge of Raahauge's Shooting Enterprises in Norco, Calif., takes aim on a flushing rooster ringneck. Photo by Michael Dickerson

We all know how pheasants are supposed to behave.

According to popular hunting literature, the average, well-adjusted pheasant holds tight for a high-bred pointer, flushes noisily and climbs nearly vertically before transitioning to horizontal flight. These by-the-book pheasants are theoretically easy to hit, for they slow momentarily as they reach the zenith of their climb, allowing the intrepid hunter to pot them virtually at will.

The problem with this scenario is that such "book pheasants," as I call them, are seemingly becoming more rare by the season. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that pheasants are evolving specifically to avoid the shot patterns of hunters, but today's bearers of long tail feathers most certainly possess and employ a wide array of defense mechanisms designed to thwart the average gunner.

Some birds flush wildly out of range, refusing to hold for man or beast. Some hold so tight you practically have to kick them into the air. Some rocket straight away and low, like quail on steroids. Others are downright cowardly. They send the females aloft as decoys to draw fire, and then duck and run like purse snatchers.

I still marvel over a pheasant I encountered last season. The bird flushed from underfoot, climbing straight up and very high. There was just one problem: the bird was literally corkscrewing in exaggerated spirals all the way. With a couple of decades of pheasant-hunting experience under my belt, I'd never seen one do that. Of course, I spun round and round with the bird, flat missing with the first barrel. I was fortunate to connect with a few pellets from the second barrel -- but not before I'd practically screwed myself into the earth. Surprisingly, the bird hung high in the wind like a kite, flapping away but not going anywhere. I even had time to reload before the bird finally helicoptered slowly to the ground.

"Thank goodness," my hunting companion said, convulsing with laughter. "I was afraid that bird would fall and kill my dog."

Even without such bizarre antics, pheasants are shifty, sly survivors of the first order. They are neither the fastest game bird around nor the most difficult to hit, but they are missed often enough -- or, more commonly, they escape without offering a shot -- that many a hunter trudges back to the truck at the end of the day commenting rather colorfully on the dubious ancestry and questionable parentage of male ringneck pheasants.

Avoidance of the empty-game-bag syndrome begins with the realization that pheasants rely on three primary survival strategies. Simply stated, they run, hide or fly. If you remember that they almost always prefer the first two options to the third, you're already ahead of the curve in devising tactics to deal with problematic birds.

Before delving into these tactics, let's be clear that we're not talking about opening-day birds. Pheasants are not immune to the laws of natural selection. The young and the terminally dumb are the first to see the inside of an oven each season. No, we're talking about birds that have figuratively been there, seen that and don't want any part of it.

As each hunting season progresses, surviving males become fewer in number but vastly smarter individually. That's especially true of birds on heavily hunted public land. When you consider that most pheasants spend much of their lives in a half-mile sized area, it doesn't take a rocket scientist of a pheasant to figure out what the sounds of approaching pickup trucks, chattering hunters and noisy canines mean. Think about it. At popular or well-known public hunting areas, most hunters park in the same spots, make the same noises, and use the same ingress and egress routes day after day, season after season. It's small wonder the birds don't win every match.