Tip: Pre-collecting Birch Bark

Description

A quick tip! Everyone knows that birch bark will burn even when its wet due to the amount of betulin oils that can be found with in it, however when you find a rotten old log like this when you are out and about collecting some of the peeling bark and drying it will make getting it to ignite both easier and give you a more efficient tinder!

Tags: Bushcraft,survival,camping,how to,Birch (Organism Classification),bark,Betula Pendula (Organism Classification),fire,tinder,primative skills

Video Transcription

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alright guys so just a quick tip for you today and what I'm going to be demonstrating today is the advantages of pre collecting your birch bark as tinder so nice fall and Burkes log here and most of stuff on it is pretty dry but what you find with these but rotting birch logs is that the bark even though it will burn when it's wet is still holding a little bit of moisture which causes it to be problematic when lighting it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to collect a little bit of this up I'm gonna do a quick demonstration using a piece of pre dry birch bark and some of the stuff that straight off this tree and demonstrate how much easier it is to get it to ignite when it's been pre dried so I'm just going to collect a bit of it it's much easier to collect and much less damaging to collect off these fallen logs and I can collect a lot of it without actually damaging the environment or any living trees or anything like that and it comes off really easily just like so don't need loads this is right by my camp that I use regularly so I'm not gonna take it all I don't need to take it all but in a matter of seconds i've collected a good bunch and there's enough there for a good five or six fires get it going so let's have a look at how much better it ignites when it's dry then where it's wet so what i've got here is a piece that was please ride this has been stone in my house and for a week or so just drying out i'm going to demonstrate really quickly how easily this ignites would just have later so you can see goes almost straight away nice hot flame the whole thing goes up it's not wanting to go out and that'll burn away so now i'm going to do the same thing with a piece of wet stuff me it's still probably going to go relatively easier well it'll be easy but it's still quite wet so this is the wettest part here so let's see how we get on with that so it's just going out as soon as it hits that wet patch it's going out so I'm having to hold that later on there much longer to get it going I mean it'll still go but if you in high winds you're going to struggle see it just keeps going out now could get this going I'm going to take it home and dry it well there you go i hope that's been useful for you just to handle it with tip dry your birch bark try again to get it going so that's going nicely now I think it's going to go out the other thing is it yeah so dry your birch bark you know there's no there's no shame in pre collecting stuff and taking it with you and make sure you've always got decent tinder you've got good tinder you're well on your way to start a fire thank you all for watching