Tulip Poplar The Best Eastern Woodland Bushcraft Resource

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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

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathfinder school what I wanted to do today was to make a video for you guys that would go into a little bit more detail on my favorite resource tree of the Eastern woodlands which is the tulip poplar and the tulip poplar or the tulip tree is not really a poplar at all it's actually a Magnolia it's just called a poplar it has very similar properties within the inner barks the carving properties and things of that nature that other poplars have like Cottonwood and basswood it's got a different leaf on it then any other poplar and it used to be called also mother-in-law shirt and if you look at that leaf upside-down it kind of looks like a nightgown and it was called mother-in-law's shirt the tulip poplar is one of the tallest trees in Eastern woodlands it grows to approximately 135 feet so you can readily identify them a lot of times on the landscape if you're on high ground by looking for the tallest trees in the landscape and generally there will be a tulip poplar if those trees are around the tulip poplar is prized for its carbon qualities and it was one of the first trees ever exported live to Europe from the continental US for those carving qualities so it is a tree that we can take advantage of in bushcraft to give us lots and lots of resources to be used from everything from fire making to implements around camp to basket tree cordage all of those types of things to include medicine so let's take a look at some tulip poplar over here in the classroom and we'll talk more about that okay this is a piece of tulip poplar that's been cut down and buck down and the bargeman stripped off of and you can see it's a very blonde light colored wood

generally the pith or the inner hardwood of this tree the heartwood I should say will be purple or green so if you find some wood out in the woods somewhere you're not sure what it is you split it open if it's got a purple or green heartwood to it a lot of times it's very likely they could be tulip poplar yeah you also have the same color heartwood sometimes in red cedar but the wood is a completely different color and red cedar as well it's not this blonde light color like this so that's an easy way to help you identify it it's also a very soft wood which makes it great for carving things like feather sticks so let's look at that real quick as well so we'll take this three-piece just set it up on this tabletop for a minute and we'll take this dryer piece that we've got linked here there's a good thing about poplar is if you get a good clear piece it doesn't have a lot of knots in it it will split fairly straight for you and that's another good quality when it comes to making things from the poplar is that it has that nice splitting quality now for feather stick making this thing does really really well because you can take very very fine shavings off of that thing so you can see the carving ability of this wood makes it an ideal for making feather sticks if you choose to use feather sticks as a fire starting aid especially once that wood is good and dry now because it carves so well it making feather sticks and also carves and shapes really well for making other projects like spoons balls very quickly and things of that nature so this is a very good wood for carving but also very good for fire started because it's very quick and easy to make a nice feather stick out of this and most of the time if you've got this good and dry and your feathers are nice and thin and you've got lots of nice curls on it you can start this on fire with a ferrocerium rod only I not have to worry about a live source of flame to get the job done you could also drop a charred Ember in there of some sort like punk wood and between a couple of these and pitch them between start a fire that way okay so when we're talking about the bark of this poplar this tulip poplar if we get the dried bark where the trees been dead for a while where it's dead standing we can peel the bark off and it will come off in sheets and the inner bark is fairly easy to then separate from the outer bark just like this or you can also take that and you can just twist it down and that bark will start to come off by itself and that lends itself to making bird nests so once you get this thing opened up you're going to start to expose these very very fine fibers that you can see here and that's going to give you the makings of your tinder bundle or your bird nest for more of a primitive type fire whether that be flint and steel percussion fire whether that be a bow drill set and some type of a friction fire I've got several videos using tulip poplar to make friction fire with and using tulip poplar birds nests or tinder bundles for placing an ember in and blowing them to flame and I'll try to put some links to those on this video if your bark is a little bit newer and this was just stripped off the other day so it's had some time to dry out but it's not dead by any means it's still got a lot of moisture in it then it may be a little more difficult to separate the inner and outer bark but because of that this makes really really good containers so I've got videos on that as well and again I'll try to put a link to those videos in here but you can't simply score this bark on the backside and fold it to make containers I'll show you a quick example of that one imagine if this bark is quite a bit wider than it is and if we just cut through the outer bark in kind of a football shape here just like this we want to make sure that those that I meets and then when we break that over just like this we then have the bottom of our container in that football shape and we can then lace that up the side now that would also make an impromptu knife sheath if you were to cut that off to the right size and lace it up you can make an impromptu knife sheath out of that we're container for lots and lots of other things whether that be a needle case something to hold your bone all all those types of things up to and including large baskets for like berries and goods like that that you collected from the wild to store them in but getting this bark off of here to get to the inner bark is what you're gonna want to do if you want to make cordage or if you want to make basket materials and to do that you're gonna kind of have to rib this down a little bit there's a couple ways you can do that when this bark is at this stage it's really best to what this to get this job done because the wetter this is the more pliable it's going to be so the best bet would be to soak this for a little while to remove that material we're not going to do that right now because I just don't think the time do it so we're going to just take a piece of this off and split it down and by making it less width we can effectively do the same thing it just won't be near as pliable for so what we're gonna do is we're going to so we're going to try to split off the inner bark from the outer bark but we could probably split this down more than once fairly easily and I'm just going to started with my knife and then we're going to do it with our fingers and again we could probably split this down more than once if we had this wet so now we're going to do is we're going to start to bend this and strip it off and what we want to do is whichever side is pulling to that's the side we want to pull on if it's starting to get fatter on one side than the other the fat side is the side we always want to pull and what this is going to do is it's going to allow us to separate the inner bark and the outer bark he said I got that big fat spot right there so I'm pulling hard on that side to get that back to the middle and now I'm starting to get fatter on this side so I want to pull on this side to get it backward toward the middle and you just kind of have to work that again if this thing is wet it's going to be much easier to do this then when it's dry so let me rid this the rest of the way off here and then we'll get to talking about making chords with this material okay so we've got a piece this material cut down now what we should talk about real quick with this before we even worry about making cordage out of this we can use what's called a witty and a witty is generally made from willow but anything that's flexible that can be used as a tie a lass sort of binding can be called a witty I could take this inner bark just like it is in a strip not even worried about making cordage out of it you just kind of twist it down and I could use that to tie something together with and tie it full-on not in this thing just like this and it's not coming undone and it's not going to break so a witty like this is a quick and dirty way to use this for cordage we're use it for lashing or attire a binding that's not going to have to make you go through the process of making cordage and you can see that thing is just fine and we could use it over and over again again the wetter it is the better off we are now for cordage we're going to want to split this down so I just split a piece off and I'm splitting it down the side and just kind of keeping even along the fibers you can see how those hairs are starting to kind of break away a little bit don't pay that much mind just kind of keep it as even as you can it's almost the same thing if it starts to run off on you pull on the pull on the thicker side to kind of get it where it needs to be you really don't want to cut this with your knife or run it under knife down it like it's a piece of leather you can do that and do this with it and it's not a big deal but the problem is it's going to weaken things up because you're gonna cut fibers and we're a little wider up here at the top that's not really a big deal now we've got something here it's gonna make some really nice cordage we just got to get it twisting and the best way to do that really at this point is to get this wet and we can do that two different ways we can soak this for a little while or we could chew on it okay so now we've kind of got to stuff wet and this is by no means a small piece of cordage this is actually a pretty large diameter piece but now all we really have to do is start to kind of twist this down you know hands and expose the fibers a little bit and kind of soften it up and as we're doing that you can see those fibers starting to expose a little bit once we get this to where its twisting up we'll be ready to make some chords on it and we'll just twist it until it twists on itself just like that and then we'll begin to do a reverse wrap chords technique again I've got videos on this as well when you're using flats like this you really have to pay attention to getting this stuff twisted down because it's going to be flat instead of round if you don't do that but this is a quick way to make towards without processing the fibers all the way down you could process these fibers down even further and it would make better cordage but you can see that it is for the most part round because I'm not twisting it until I've twisted it two or three times and then I'm twisting it over so I'm twisting each piece a couple three times before I turn it back to make sure the test going around instead of staying flat and that's important but this is going to be a heavy enough diameter cordage really

the deck could probably be used for a bow-drill fire without breaking if you had a good set you'd have to sit there for 20 minutes messing around with it so you've got a lot of resources in this poplar tree and we'll kind of go over those again one more time okay so back to looking at this tree and explaining kind of why it's my favorite resource of Eastern woodlands looking at from the outside you've got a tree that's very easy to identify it doesn't look like anything else as it grows it drops its lower branches so it generally has scars on the side of the tree because it's time to trying to attain photosynthesis so you have a tree that probably for the first 20 feet in the tree in a deep canopy is going to be nice and straight with no branches on it which is why Daniel Boone probably made his canoe from the poplar because he didn't have to do a bunch of lemming to get the job done he just got the tree down cut the large trunk off of it made his canoe beyond that you have the outer bark which can easily be used for container making which we've talked about and I'll put links to them on this video once you get to the inner bark of the tree you have material that you can make not only with these in court each other but also baskets when it's dry you have a material that you can shred down and to find fibers to make a bird nest or a tinder bundle you have a soft wood when the wood is dried out for making feather sticks and things like that for creating fire if the wood is green it's a very good carving wood to make camp implements like spoons bowls dough troughs and things like that and then the tree itself is a medicinal in the fact that it's astringent and it has drawing properties so you have a lot of great bushcrafting qualities in one tree that is really one of the most prevalent trees at least in my area of the Eastern woodlands and it kind of takes over because it's very very prolific you can have a tulip poplar that's two years old and that thing will be 20 feet high whereas you might have a Hickory that's a couple of years old that might only be five feet high high so it grows very very quickly and it will also grow from the stump very easily so if you trim it back you're going to get multiple shoots like you would with willow if you are practicing coppicing so it's a very very renewable tree it's also a prolific tree and it's a very usable tree for what we do in bushcraft and wood craft and that's why it's one of my favorite trees in Eastern

and I wanted to start maybe a small series as I get time here on specifics about trees starting with my favor when the tulip poplar now I will tell you that I apologize for some of the little short dank videos that I put up over the last couple of weeks but it's really all of God I can't really take the time to try to film things when I'm being paid to do something else it's really not right to people I'm getting paid for an appearance or paid to do a presentation filming that and then putting it out on YouTube is probably not the most honest thing to do as far as taking care of the people that are taking care of me at the same time we're doing a lot of traveling right now we're doing a lot of teaching right now I just got back from Scandinavia and the UK I just got done with the class yesterday I have another class that starts at the end of next week that's a pioneer class then I have a class training some military folks for a week after that I have a blacksmithing class that starts the day that military exercise ends and then not long after that I have to leave for Japan for the Japan mark Nev adventure and I get back from Japan one day before the Pathfinder gathering so you can see my schedules pretty overloaded right now and so I apologize for the lack of quality content and the amount of videos that I'm putting up but I'm really trying to do the best I can and stay true to my YouTube viewers as well and kind of keep getting that content as I can I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I appreciate everything you do for school for family and for business both are sponsored instructors affiliates and Friends and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can guys thanks