Over several morning coffees this November, Christoffersen would watch pheasant hunters at work. The sportsmen were cornering the popular game bird near his wheat and cattle farm in Minnesota, but to no luck. The birds seemed to have learnt the trick to avoiding the hunters.

"I'd watch," Christoffersen recently said to local press. "The hunters would go in one end of the field, and the birds would start going out the other end."

By the time that four hunters from Duluth arrived and visited farm friends, Christoffersen had figured out how the birds were escaping. Like a general on a battlefield, he gave instructions to the hunting group for the early morning hunt. One hunter would work east from a fence line while another would work their way down from a northern grassy swale.

The two other hunters would push the pheasants from their shelter in the hay yard and push them up the swale from a southeastern direction.

While this was happening Christoffersen would watch from the high ground with his five month old Labrador.

What happened was a remarkable. Instead of the usual hunter failure that had been seen on the ground for the past month, six roosters were flushed and harvested in quick succession – their escape plan ruined.

Even Christoffersen almost didn’t believe the plan was a success, exclaiming "It worked!" when the hunters next saw him.

However, for that one hunting group, that was the best of the action. Throughout the rest of the day, the four man hunting group only managed to harvest one more rooster. The trouble was that many of the birds were flushing before the group could get close enough to pull off a shot. As one hunter put it, “this wasn’t their first rooster rodeo.”

Have your hunting trips been met with clever evading roosters this year? How have you compensated for this?

Let us know in the comments below.