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PFODJ Ep 2

Description

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

[Music]

back in the woods [Music]

back in

[Music]

[Music]

we just took a rabbit out of this clearing about an hour ago there's a lot of small game trails coming out of this wooded area right here besides just clearing and this is like a pipeline and there's brush all along here heavy amounts of brush with small game trails coming in and out so I think what we're gonna do is we're going to take our snare stands and we're going to set up about a half dozen small game snares in here see if we can test our luck let's get after it okay let's have a quick discussion about the anatomy of a snare you can see at the bottom of the snare at the end of the cable there is a device that is heavier metal construction and that is a swivel and what that allows the animal to do is swivel a little bit of the snare around without tangling it up too much or twisting the cable obviously if you have entanglement in the area that your snare is they're gonna wrap that wire around something anyway but it's just an extra bit of safety for the animal or more comfort for the animal to keep them from just twisting that wire shorter and shorter and shorter above that going around the cable you have a block piece of rubber called a whammy and that's simply a piece of rubber tubing that is over the top of the wire that you used to connect to your snare stand as we discussed yesterday you'll put that whammy on the snare stand and it's basically a stabilizer to hold that snare wire in one place to pinch it so that you can make your loop as big or small as you need to below that you have a locking device which is basically an L type bracket that when pulled backwards locks on itself so that it cannot come loose in the state of Ohio you also have to have what's called a deer lock on a snare which would be another piece of metal within the snare to loop two inches from the lock that is just wrapped around the cable and crimped down to keep that snare from closing any tighter than two inches in diameter so you have to have that in some states as well and that's called a deer lock looking at this snare you can understand why

they are effective they are much more effective and much more robust than a snare made from something like picture wire or just regular wire you can use regular wire snares but they're not going to hold the animal as well as something with a locking device something that you can easily adjust a loop on to make it more effective to catch the animal and then a swiveling device that you can tie off to to make it more comfortable on the animal until he chokes himself out but normally you do not get neck catches in a snare everybody would like to think they're going to get in that catch and the animals going to choke himself out very quickly the reality of that is you generally catch animals in the body right back by the rear legs and they're live when you get there now that can be advantageous or disadvantageous depending on the animal you're snaring remember live food never spoils there's our squirrel we cooked up boiled up and you know we got a little bit of an issue that we need to think about tonight and this can happen to you in any situation like this right now we're living high off the hog we got a coyote we got a rabbit and we got a squirrel all inside of three days it's a squirrel sick old frozen rabbit skinned and gutted coyote hanging the reason I'm eating a squirrel right now instead of eating some coyote meat is because tomorrow is supposed to be above 40 degrees once it's above 40 degrees now we got problems now that coyote is good and frozen all the way through the squirrel was frozen tube he's gonna thaw out fast because a small block of ice the rabbit same thing so what I'm gonna have to do is I'm going to have to stuff myself with food today and tomorrow morning because I know I'm not gonna preserve it without using some other technique now I can smoke it or something like that but if I cook the meat it's going to preserve it some I could cook this meat hang it up in a tree and it'll be good tomorrow

just as well as it is today just like leftovers in your refrigerator it's gonna be that cool it'll be right around 50 degrees but it's not going to be cool enough to preserve raw meat it's gonna have to be cooked so I'm gonna eat squirrel now we need rabbit tomorrow you know when we're sitting around camp like we are right now is the time we do small chores and one of the things that I'm gonna do tonight while I'm cooking up some food here is I'm going to make some snare stands so that I could snare some small game I've got a half a dozen small game snares in my pack the only thing I really need for that is some sticks and a roll of trapping wire and my pliers and I keep these pliers in the front of my pack but when I'm on the trail out in the woods I generally keep them tucked in my boot right here when I'm on the trapline so I can get to them really easy and they're just a pair of heavy jaw pliers that have line cutters and dimmer wire cutters in them on two sides okay so any stick will do that's nice and straight and fairly hard wood prepare the top of that pretty much just like I would have steak I was going to put in the ground by bulldozing it over on the top so that when I hit it with my ax or whatever to drive it in if I have to it's not going to mushroom out then the bottom just needs to be very simple it can either be just a wedge or you can go ahead and cut it down to a three-sided point a four-sided point doesn't matter you're just going to put that in the ground anyway okay this is all we need now to go along with that we're gonna need about I don't know 10 inches of wire and this is just regular trap wire bailing wire bailing wire from a hardware store work fine for this and you're just going to take this and wrap it around a couple of times and what I like to do is when I'm done with that I'll just take my pliers and I'll squash it down real good on there make sure I've got that tab bent over and just crimp it real good on there just like that so when I'm done I want something looks like this now the next step in this to complete this is just to take a turn and I usually go the width of my plier jaws and take a turn just like this and bring that down and that's where my whammy is going to go is on that and I'll crimp that down on top of my whammy

[Music]

hey I'm country backwoods and hungry I spend every Sunday just living good my little fish a little hunting on the weekend with a bow I was sneaking back in the woods [Music]

little bit crazy every now and then like to kick off my boots and get lazy just a redneck [Music]

[Music]

back in the woods what I want to do now is I want to show you another trick or tip that you can use for wet weather or damp condition fires if you have a tinder bundle that is marginal or wet like the tulip poplar bark that we've been collecting out here in the Eastern woodlands with the snow and the rain in the wet weather that we've had for the last few days you can't break that marginal tinder up let it lay out a little bit in the breeze to dry out somewhat and then you can ensure your fire by using direct flame I'm going to show you how to get direct flame today by using a candle in a ferrocerium rod and the lighter we have a candle here that's already been on fire so the wick is charred that is now charred material we can take advantage of that to light this candle from Mifare cerium rod but there's a little bit of a trick that we need to understand so what we're going to do is we're going to set our candle aside for a minute we're going to take the back of our knife and we're just going to start to slowly scrape shavings off of this rod in a small pile right here on the log and it does not have to be a large pile by any means remember not to scrape this fast enough to get sparks you're only trying to remove material and that's another advantage that you have with a very sharp spine on your knife is that ease of removing material and now we'll take this material and we'll gather it up somewhat the best we can into a smaller pile

just like this once we've done that we're going to lay our candle with the wick down at an angle just like this so again the heat rises up I chose a big enough stump here we'll know in a minute now what we intend to do is we intend to ignite the material here which will in turn ignite our wick then when our candles lit we can then put this into our fire [Music]

well the snow is melted now and this is where we set our snares and this snare has not been touched here but if you look at this in contrast now with no snow it's really not real apparent why that snare was set there yes there's an overhanging branch here possibly a trail going through there but you can't really see that without the snow and that's an important thing to understand when you're setting snares is you really have to find the right places to set the snare and when I set this here there was a trail coming through here or small-game that came through here a rabbit

there was a urine puddle back in the back and I could tell there was some also some scat in the snow so he'd been coming through here and around this corner and that's why the snare was set right here but it doesn't appear that way now and that's an important understanding that we need to have when we're setting snares is how and where we set those snares we've only got a half a dozen out here none of them have hit today I want to show you another one that was knocked down but it's important to understand why these snares were placed where they were because when you're limited to the number of traps that you have it's very important that you set sign this snares been knocked down and bumped by something and when we set this snare in the snow there were deer tracks coming around this side but there was an obvious set of tracks or trail going underneath this duck under and that's why the snare was placed there and something has knocked his snare completely down now it could be a lot of things could have been a deer tripped over it and kicked this coming over that can very possibly be the case or it could have been that we just didn't have the right set so we're gonna go ahead and put this back on get this set back the way we need it it's important to understand we set these snares we want that snare lock right out about 12:00 o'clock so that all something has to do is bump it and it falls that's what we want when that animal comes across that trail it tries to hop through or walk through the snare as soon as he bumps it we weren't to fall down on him that's important for us to understand as well is the position of that locking device in relation to our snare stand and then we just fenced it off a little bit just like that now I'm going to drop it down just a little bit lower to the trail this time just in case that was the problem I probably end up with a body catch because of that but that's okay for me

sitting here today and a makeshift a line right down on the water's edge got a pond off to the left of me here creek bed running up in front of me off to the right

I have woods in back of me and there's woods across this Creek as well lots of game trails coming in and out of here lots of areas for birds to fly in this is the reality of trying to sustain yourself in meat sources off the land you constantly have to be on the hunt you constantly have to be trapping you constantly have to be looking for those available meat sources they're not going to come to you other than come into your traps but you still got to get out and check those traps no matter what the weather is that goes back to the gear that you own the gear that you use if you plan to be out in this stuff a lot you've got to have the best quality gear that you can get because that stuff has to be durable it has to be long-lasting and it has to be what's going to protect your core temperature no matter what the weather is

we got about 38 39 degrees and sleet right now the mixture of rain and sleet rained all night last night it's supposed to turn to snow later on today so what was snow a couple days ago is now gone a fresh coat of snow is going to be coming in that's gonna be good for the track and good for the trapping but it just makes life a hassle because now to collect water sources you're going to have to go to areas that have lots of runoff there's no more snow so now you're there collecting rain or you're going to collect runoff water from these creeks in which case now you're going to need to start boiling in water again one of the big advantages to using snow in the wintertime as your water source is that you have no need to boil the snow

you need only melt the snow to give you potable water it's just like collecting rain except it's in frozen form I don't have to boil it to get rid of waterborne pathogens it's good to go as is and as long as I'm not melting yellow snow I should be fine folks I'm Dave Canterbury is pathfinder TV I appreciate you joining me out here for another episode today we thank you for your subscriptions we thank you for your views and your comments I'll be back to another episode of pathfinder TV just as soon as I can thanks guys

About the Author

wildernessoutfitters

wildernessoutfitters

From the lore of bushcraft to all things related to self-sustainability, the Pathfinder vision is to pass on the knowledge of outdoor self-reliance. Providing basic to advanced self-reliance training and survival gear, our goal is to offer both practical knowledge and survival gear that will stand the test of time. From emergency preparedness to sustainability, the Pathfinder way is to share and educate.

Here you can explore the world of survival knives, survival kits and simple tips on outdoor self-reliance. We are always learning and enjoy passing on the knowledge we acquire.

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