Bushcraft Basics Ep16: Field Journal

Description

A short episode covering Field Journals.

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Video Transcription

hi there guys smoke from mcq bushcraft here and welcome to another episode of bushcraft basics in last week's episode episode 15 we had a look at first-aid kits and just a really basic first-aid kit that you could use for personal cuts and injuries that you might obtain you out in the field and it's always a really good idea to carry something like that even though you have items in your kit that could double up and be used for fur say things like scarfs and cordage and other types of tank than there are natural environments around having just a small personal first-aid kit with you is just essential in most respects it's the first thing you'll turn to and it's the thing you wish you had if you didn't have it but moving on from that we're going to start getting out into the field now and using a variety of different equipment we're going to be moving on to heavy cutting tools and then fire lighting methods and we're actually going to start practicing with natural resources and processing those resources and we'll need our tools to do that I think before we move into all of that a really good thing to cover would be field journals I have two field journals here this field journal here is a small pocket field journal that I carry around with me and the other one is a bit of a larger one that I'm gradually migrating over to and it's more of like a book in most respects that I'm kind of writing in and writing about various plants and Natural Resources and field gels are really an extension of your mind some of us itthere have really good memories I've always got a good memory for things that I'm interested in but a lot of the time you can forget things and you can often forget experiences that you have and I think having a field journal it's a great way of just having information on you books are bulky they have a lot of information in that you might not want so taking those books and taking what you do want from them and putting it into a book that's in like an extension of your mind is a fantastic way of carrying things in the field that you really need to so I'm going to show you what's in my field journals just a bit of the information that's in there just to give you an idea of the kind of things I like to write about so this is my smaller field Journal this is like a pocket one that I can put in my cargo pocket on my trousers and just carry around with me sometimes but I am migrating over to a larger one that will live inside my pack and it will just be more comprehensive with more detail is the more you learn the more you know about something the more information sometimes you want to write down and it's always nice to record your your interests but we open this up here this is just a Filofax I got this for about five quid it was discounted in a shop although fiber faxes are very expensive generally so I probably wouldn't recommend them unless you can get them real cheap but all you want is something with a binder like this and the reason I have a folder like this with a binder is because it allows me to organize information the problem I find with notebooks that the pages are glued in is sometimes you want to rearrange information because you learn things at different rates one minute you might be learning about one plant family the next day you might be learning about another and you write them in as you learn them but they might not be related in any way so later date you might want to organize them into alphabetical order like I've done here or then at a later stage I could organize these into plant family by just shifting them all around a bit so it gives you a lot more flexibility on just organization and assembling things in an order that you want them to be in but you can see we've got alphabetically organized pages here and really this is just for plants at the moment they're not assembled in plant family they're just in alphabetical order we've got their white briney we look at that one there you can see we've got the name common name that is their white briney and we've got the scientific name and we've got the actual family and we've got whether it's a perennial or an annual so the kind of season span it stretches for we've got there from this is May to October and then whether it's poisonous and this one obviously is so I've got that written there so this is really the way I sort of organized a lot of my information you can see quite a few plants that a lot of these are actually poisonous at the moment but we've got another one there this is cuckoo flower again a few illustrations who got the leaf the upper leaves the actual flower the amount of stamens it has and they're only very very basic illustrations they're not works of art but it's just enough really for you to look at and just to give you a bit of a visual understanding of what you're looking at but I'll show you the other journal this is really just a small one a knife as I've been working out of this I've been sort of removing a few of the pages but it's easy to make a journal like this if you have a big sheet of leather all you've got to do is cut a square right find the middle punch two holes and then get cheap binder and get some of those screws you get that you get off like um holsters and off of a Kydex sheath and things and you basically just bolt it in and then you've got an a5 folder that you can write him this was actually made for me by company online but I've just put this in because I only have this cold to begin with you can barely turn a page on it I've only really just started writing in this one that's black knightshade you can see a lot of this needs to be gone over an ink to stop it deteriorating over time so I'm just writing more information better illustrations of the buds of the berry you know the amount of samples around the berry they're a better illustration of the leaf that's bittersweet it's quite an interesting one you see that everywhere at this time of year again just better illustrations of the leaves of the buds of the berries a bit of a better description and yeah later on these can be these can be organized there's white Briony I don't see that very often around here white briny got black Briony a very very common black briny see that everywhere creeping around the Hawthorn looking at Abel and it's not really shouldn't be eating that we've got wavy bit across and hairy bit across you can see some illustrations there just leaf structure fruits flowers upper leaves always differ to lower leaves all the genus scientific name there whether it's native or not something I didn't include on the other Journal so there's always things to add and it's always good to rewrite journals because you do such a better job the second time round and there's deadly nightshade so even though in some people's eyes journals like this will be seen as a very trivial thing in wilderness living skills you've just got to think about people who have spent you know their whole life living out in the wilderness people like dick brown okay he spent over 30 years living out in the wilderness alone and even though you know he was an incredibly competent person he recorded these skills in in many different ways his experiences and you know people able to read those journals that he's got and actually have a look at is photography and is videography and be inspired by it it inspires a lot of people's go out and do a lot of different things so I hope that's inspired some people out there certainly something that I need to do more write in my journal and I hope you've enjoyed this episode thank you again for watching and I'll see you very soon in another episode take care guys and thank you again you