Starting a Fire with a Mushroom (Polypore Fungus)

Description

How to find and use the polypore tinder fungus to catch a spark and form a coal. This is a powerful firestarter, especially in extreme cold or very wet conditions. Visit http://www.rewildu.com/polypore-tinder-fungus/ to learn more!

Tags: polypore tinder fungus,tinder fungus,survival skills,wilderness survival,bushcraft,rewildu university,re-wilding,Kenton Whitman,starting fires,fire without matches,Swedish firesteel,Light My Fire firesteel,ancestral skills

Video Transcription

on this tree we have an example of one that's still alive especially when you look at the underside you can see that nice creamy texture and color up above well that one's obviously too far gone this one is just about perfect we look at the underside it's no longer alive but it's not so rotted out that it's just going to fall apart we're not touch it nice and firm but dead so it's going to be dry the paste I'll take a look at the top - this one does have a number of holes and allow water to get down inside there so listen over here might be a better bet the right stage to break off fairly easily and here you can see that poor structure here is a close-up of the tubes this is a side view and it's been broken off on the bottom and there they are travelling up through the structure of the fungus and that essentially is the route that our coal will take after we light it it will travel up along those tubes and work its magic here we're just feathering up the tops of those pores and preparing them to receive our spark set your fire steel directly on it and you've got it taken here you may not even see smoke at first you can actually tell that you have it by the smell so you'll smell the very distinctive burning of this coal and I'm going to wait for a couple of minutes and show you what's happened here's a close-up this is about a minute later you can see that the coal is working its way down through the pores I'll try to get closer there we go and see it working its way down again not a lot of smoke there's a little bit but you really can smell it it's very easy to set another one burning just set it to it and you have a call starting on your second one this coal is just going to keep growing and growing blowing on it here but you don't need to you can just let it sit by now this is a big enough coal that it's throwing out some nice heat it's going to continue growing you can warm up my hands by it and ideal for starting a fire especially if you're in conditions where you're dealing with wet tinder or wet wood again that blowing isn't necessary but I'm doing it just to show you what's going on inside of there this is about four or five minutes after that first spark I'm going to go for a short woods run and come back in about ten minutes and we'll see how that coals doing okay back then about ten minutes this is all burn - and see we still have a really nice coil going and I'll show you how easy it is to start a fire with one of these let's have some winter dry leaves here and we have flames there it is ready to use again you just thought it sit for another 10-15 minutes and it would still be ready to do the same thing you