How To Start A Fire From Birch Bark Using Only A Spark

Description

In this Video Fozz of Forrester Bushcraft demonstrates how to get a flame from the bark of a birch tree. this is an excellent method for lighting a fire in both an emergency situation or as a method for general use.

with practice is is very simple to use this method to get a flame from just a spark in most weather conditions.

Tags: YouTube Editor,Birch Bark,fire,bushcraft,survival,Camping,SHTF,bug out,emergency,How-to (Media Genre),Ray Mears,Bear grylls,wilderness,Survival Skills (TV Genre)

Video Transcription

hi everyone what we're gonna be looking at today is how to take some birch bark from a birch tree and get that to take just a spark and using that I've got some birch bark which has been kindly donated by Pete thank you very much for this I really really appreciate little guess that my cameraman passed it on to me Dave and I was really happy to get a bundle of birch bark really cool I'm happy to see that you've used a bit of bramble though I think to a tie lock so thanks very much so let's have a look at how to get this to turn it into a powder and get a spark to take on it and get a fire okay so what I've done is I've taken a section of the birch bark and what I need to do just as the birch bark comes off the tree you're going to find it's curved like this and that's going to be a bit of a problem trying to do this which curves so what we don't wanna do is take that curve out of it I'm going to do that is I'm just going to very gently bend it along these striations just to take that curve out or flatten out a little bit okay so I'm going to turn the birch bark over so I want the white side facing down so this kind of orangey Brown sides facing upwards and then I need to scrape this birch bark you'll notice if you look at the bark it has these horizontal striations going through it and as you try and scrape that if you're coming across those you just gonna break your birch bark up it's going to be quite difficult so what you want to be doing is working with that gray and going along it okay so I'm going to face this this way I'm going to take my knife use my smaller or more woodland knife might be a little bit awkward I might have to change which is nice I'm using and I'm going to scrape this until I get a nice little set of powder on the okay so being very careful this is very sharp and I don't want to cut my fingers while I'm doing exactly make life much more difficult so all need to do is start scraping this and almost immediately you can start seeing this is powder forming okay it starts off a little difficult as you get as you go into it this technique gets much easier as it starts to smooth itself out set out the way and if you're going to be doing this don't go straight out and rely on using this technique is quite difficult and this is very dry dry bar

it has been donated to me it's been sat around for it has has a chance to dry out this birchbark full of oil which means it does burn really easily but anything that's dumped is going to be difficult to actually get to take a spot because the dampness takes the heat away from it so I'm aiming to get quite a decent-sized pile of the powder you can see it starting to kind of build up just here now and I need to start moving around a little bit tricky thing to watch for when you're doing this as I'm scraping this bark is bouncing a little bit it's spreading that powder out so you need to be careful not to lose any of it it's it's the kind of its kind of flinching underneath the pressure of the knife this technique does blunt your knife slightly it's just I've just worn my way through to the stone here underneath so I don't wanna be scraping my life along that stone it's going to damage the edge so I'm going to move all that powder along and work on a slightly different section of the bark key thing as with all fire lighting techniques take your time don't rush this is very very difficult in high wind or bad weather conditions so if you're doing this in the truck and down rain or in a storm whatever you're going to want to be doing this underneath the tarpaulin or somewhere like that so I've got a little bit of a pilot not sure it's going to be big enough but let's give it a go

I'm going to use a pharisee and rod to get this to take and next to me I've got some dried old man's beard lichen which hopefully will take on the flame and this doesn't work I'm going to leave it in the video because I want you to see the the problems you might face using this technique but I'm sure then we get a fire of it's not technique I use very often but let's have a look so using my strike is gonna be slightly different than how I would normally do this normally I just throw the spots into a piece of timber or whatever but this time to avoid throwing all this dust everywhere I'm actually going to do is I'm going to place the rod onto it and I support it with my index finger of my left hand and then I'm going to scrape this on really nice and controlled in those sparks straight into that powdered section there about one thing that I might do first is I'm going to take some scrapings off my Ferro rod and put them into the bundle first up getting a sparks and hopefully that will aid it this is quite a long pursuing Rob making this quite difficult okay so we've got a flame now let's see we get this tinder to take and there we go you've got the makings of a small fire there it's that simple guys if I was to turn this into a proper fire I'd just work it a little better a little more and I take some thin slivers from my the rest of my bundle and I get them to take again always taking my time to do it working really hard to keep that flame alive it's a very very small flame but see we can get some of this birch bar to take on the main birch bark stake as well that's absolutely fantastic so you can see using this technique you are going to be able to get the fire quite easily give your patient with it and you take your time oh that Birchbox starting to curl around on itself quite a lot it makes it difficult so you go that's how to get a flame from your birch bark using just a knife and a pharisee Imran thank you all for watching guys