Bushcraft - Duck, Flint and Steel, Traditional Gear (Field Sports)

Description

I head out into the woods for some solo bushcraft and field sports. I use traditional flint and steel gear to get a fire going, cook some good food over the fire and then head out with a friend to find some pigeon and duck. Thanks for joining me on the adventure.

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Tags: bushcraft,duck,flint and steel,traditional gear,solo bushcraft,solo bushcraft camp,winter bushcraft,winter camping,winter,camping,survival,wilderness survival,wilderness,wild,tips,bushcraft skills,bushcraft tips,ta outdoors,ta outdoors bushcraft,woods,forest,food,cooking,over the fire,adventure,solo,alone,alone in the woods,alone in the wild,pigeon,wild food,wild edibles,off grid,log cabin,cabin,shelter,bushcraft camp

Video Transcription

hey guys thanks very much clicking on this episode slightly different one in the sense that I'm going to do two things today we've had loads of rain everything's really damp I'm gonna get fire going and cook up some food but later this afternoon I'm actually going out the shotgun with my buddy George at his farm but for the meantime so stick around if you want to watch that that will be that segment will hopefully come after this bit it's really windy I've come to a different area of the woodland because I had a comment from a young boy of about I'd know 13 I think he was I can't remember his name and he was saying he's really struggling with flint and steel fire lighting and he's just really struggling to get fire going with it so I thought I'd give some tips really on flint and steel fire lighting especially in damp conditions because it's it's a relatively tricky technique anyway let you in the dry conditions but when things are damp and when your materials are damp it's actually quite a difficult form of fire lighting so I'll just give you guys some tips and what what I tend to do when it's wet for flint and steel we'll get some food going obviously got to get some food going overcast day not too cold but it is wet and it's forecasted showers that's what I've brought some rain gear on but I brought some a bit more traditional gear with me I've got a waxed canvas backpack over there which I'll tell you about later that's actually made for me by a guy on Instagram

called meandering maker you make some awesome stuff so I'll show you that backpack and I've got a traditional flint and steel kit as well which I wanted to show you so let me go and get that for you now and then we'll get this fire

[Applause]

so this is the fire lighting kit that I've got that I'm gonna use I bought this from a website called Beaver bushcraft it's run by mark and Helen hoard and I saw them at the bushcraft show and I saw this on their stand they saw that really fast and I kept for monitoring their website afterwards they're really nice people and yeah I bought this from their website this is Helen I think makes all the leather but sharp design she's got these cool sharp logos and things but this is just the leather carrying case and inside I've got just a bit of cloth to keep this copper tin this is pretty awesome this is a Hudson Bay HBC Hudson Bay Company style tinderbox basically and in there I've got Flint here pieces of Flint I've got my steel striker there I've got some rope here which you know I can just fluff up I've got some char cloth as well another big piece of Flint and then some a MIDI which is from the species of fungi that you can boil up and they're dry and you get this almost char cloth like material but it's completely 100% natural from the amedy it's cool remedies so yeah that's I don't know if it was the native Indians that that came up with this first I don't know too much about the history of where this material was made first but that's kind of what's in it it's also quite cool because only tin on the top there's actually a magnifying glass there as well so you can do some fire by sunlight and magnifying glass which is pretty cool so yeah a really nice traditional piece of kit that I'll put a link to in the description to the website where I bought it from I think they only set up the website I'm not sure they do other ones but so I'm gonna take these Flint this piece I've used before you can see I've bashed it up a bit obviously I'm gonna take my steel striker

some chalk loss now this chocolate isn't amazing I prefer using bits of towel and things like that I don't think this is towel this looks like it's quite flat there you want it really fluffed up chocolate but I'll get two pieces of that just in case as it does shred up after a while keep it all together and you have copper tarnish is really easily you can see it gets that green tarnish on it say I wear your moisture on your hands touch it just goes a bit funny so I tend to keep that wrapped up anyway in there we're getting there so that's a cool piece of kit it's nice and traditional I like using traditional gear I'm swaying towards traditional gear it's quite nice it's heavier but it's more authentic and it just makes you appreciate what our ancestors had to work with essentially you obviously don't need to hit this whole kit all you really need is a piece of Flint some steel you can use the back of some carbon nice they've got a nice 90 degree spine and some char cloth which is really easy to make obviously the most important thing there any fire lighting is getting your resources prepped and ready beforehand so I've got some oak and some pine there some really dry dead oak Scots pine here some pine twigs and some oak twigs in there as well so more oak here dead completely dry it was hanging from a tree you can see it's nice and dry collected some grass now this is damp this doesn't look it but it's wet damp whereas coz we've had lots of rain I found a nice bit of birch bark now I could use the scrapings from that and just get fire going much easier but the whole point is this as a flint and steel tutorial bit so that's going to keep all my materials dry as I like them and as that fire builds it's also going to protect the moisture because this is soaking you can see it's absolutely soaked so essentially that's what this flat piece of birch is gonna be for like a fire lay really and then I've got birch scrapings here again these are soaking wet but birch is really good in wet conditions yeah so for a kid who wanted to know about I can't remember your name so just listen carefully boy listen gavage these tips what you got to do with your wet tinder it's really fluff it up this is just grass dried dead grass it's not dry but I'm drying out by ripping up breaking up all those fibers and just buffing it really like this to expose the dry inner fibers of the grass because that's what you want this outside stuff is completely sight any little twigs pull out because they've wet as well so this is still wet and this takes a while and then the more you do this the fluffier it gets and try and just rip it up and you can see it's starting to get a bit fluffier but I'm gonna do this for about I know a couple of minutes really because the prep is important and it needs those fibers to be exposed so keep doing it keep ripping up the grass because that's what's gonna get the dry inner fibers of the grass exposed a bit better there might be some mm light aircraft flying over cuz there's a little small aircraft field not far from here so apologies if it flies over midway through firelight in which it most definitely will because it always seems to happen and it just sounds really annoying when I edit it back I've seen a buzzer today lovely big big buzzard bird of prey to kites red kites plant your gray squirrel always in here and there's some evidence of some deer trail's not far from here some game trails I might show you in a bit right say I've ripped that up fluffed it up a bit more this is still gonna be hard to take I might fail it that's ooh nice it's very difficult with wet a wet tinder bundle you know you know if I was doing if I needed to light a fire in these conditions I wouldn't really do finish still I just used the birch bark because that's amazing when everything is soaked and I'd get this fire going no problem but that's not the point is it Mike I've got to tuck this little boy learn some fire lighting tips a flap it up good so there we go

made a little birds nest made a little divot there it's important you make that divot I'll explain why later these Oaks are acting as a brace release I'm going to lean the sticks up against that allows some airflow underneath it also dries them out hoping they should catch as well I've cleared all this this is all damp ground off Plato believes that's another important thing in Carroll the leaves but this is soaking wet so be fine print Flint steel char cloth let me explain what I'm gonna do now yeah I'm gonna leave this all in one shot I think we'll try and do this well actually let me explain what I'll do first and then I'll move the camera so what you want to do find your sharp edges of the Flint it's fairly obvious which one it is hold your trial cloth against it now like I said it's char plus not very good so it's gonna take a few strikes but if you say if i zoom in a bit what you want to leave is about a two millimeter gap you want to leave a gap from here to your char cloth that way when you strike down the sparks go up and generally that way but they if you're striking down the spot a few spots will go down but most should tend to go up if you've got this - too far over you're just gonna smother your sparking and it's gonna almost extinguish your spark straight away so you need a little bit of a gap like that just a couple of millimeters just so you can see it that way when you strike down if I really whack it there you go there's a spark already and that's glowing but I put out because I want to do it from a different angle so mmm the other thing is your wrist it's all in the wrist with flint and steel so you see people completely bashing and smashing it and really really hard you don't need to it's just a flick of your wrist almost all Flint or worse still strikers a fairly different but they have the same principle design you've got your straight piece here and that's the piece that you want to meet on the sharp edge of the Flint so you're coming down on it like that and the more material you scrape the more chance you're going to get a spark and each time you're going to dull the edge so you want to try and if you keep going in it's too dull and you're getting no sparks move along to to further down or further up from the Flint and work on another edge sometimes you have to flip it over but yeah just work around the edge so once that's lit I'm gonna blow that like I was doing just then to get a nice good Ember then I'm gonna place it into this tinder bundle the hard bit is getting this tinder bundle to go up and the harder bit is getting the this when this is in flame - then take on the sticks and that's where the birch bark comes in because I'll be putting this birch bark on top because if this catches it's gonna burn a lot longer this is almost like a flash tinder it's very fast so it's going to go out very fast this is a bit more slower burning this birch bark so if I can get these on top and they light then we're in we should get a fire going so let's give it a go now right here we go flint and steel in the wet conditions this was raining I almost certainly wouldn't use this technique believe this honey tonight so same again striking down with the rest right there's my child material at this point there's no rush really but I want to get it get it in there to dry out this material as well there's not much chocolate this I'm gonna put that other bit in as well long slow breaths now so what's happening where I've blown that that's now gone out that flame by the way but this is a real time situation what's happening is this grass is so wet there's not enough charcoal in there that it's it's basically burning out it's it's burning but it's not hot enough to ignite the grass but that's okay

that that was a failed attempt but that's fine because that's now dried out that in a bit of grass where that heat was I can feel that's really dry in there so we do the same again we get a bit more char cloth more char cloth now I'm running our charcoal off already which is typical but what might do is is have some amedy here as well because that will light if I put that there use what you've got in your kit adapt if you've got more char cloth add more char cloth to it because you want a good bundle of char cloth when it's wet no practice what you preach now let's tonight so Mamadou put them both in there now this is the bit as hard just need one birchbark piece to light now that wasn't easy you can see let me keep the camera running that was really difficult because that was it was so wet it was just so wet it was going out all the time but I had to keep adding loads of oxygen so that's your key is materials oxygen this point all this wood is still wet so I've got my small sticks on get your big sticks on as well because it's gonna dry it all out so get a load of sticks on there whenever it's working at low the sticks on I'm not gonna smother it because there's loads of out there it's gonna be a smoky fire because it's wet but just goes to show you force that oxygen in there drawing out that material sorry the cameras getting ring smoke but I'll try draw out that material force the oxygen in there and now by putting all these sticks on which are soaking wet set these dry oak ones it's just gonna keep blowing through and it will smoke to begin with and then we'll get a clean burn at this point I need to go looking for more firewood

that's okay

[Music]

Oh so hopefully that helped the young lad out there who wanted to know a little bit about Flint it's still fighting in damp conditions cooked up some food

that was my breakfast for today so hopefully now I'm gonna go with George my buddy George I'm gonna get back get my shotgun get my cartridges we're gonna head out it's 12 o'clock 12:30 now it's dark at 4:00 so we're probably only gonna get about by the time we're out there I know two hours of shooting maybe but we can hopefully shoot into the Twilight it's why that area twilight zone and maybe if we get a pigeon maybe we'll cook it up for you but it's very time dependent I'm going to New York tomorrow I've brought my wife for our wedding anniversary I bought my wife Emmy two tickets to New York so I'm coming to America people going to I think we're staying in Midtown yeah we're staying in Midtown in a hotel so when you guys are watching this we will be in New York already maybe if you want to follow my Instagram you can keep up to date with that of these some posts yeah so that's a Monday to Friday money suffer tea and then I'm back mmm and then there's gonna be some change on the channel for sure I'm gonna mix things up a bit I'm gonna change things up it's too repetitive at the moment to say me yeah things are gonna change for the good hopefully you guys enjoy anyway be for the good I'm I'm hoping you will you'll like the content that's going to come it's definitely going to be slightly different it's it's time for change well overdue a change but yeah thanks very much for watching if you're still watching this far I'm gonna grab this bag I'm gonna grab my shotgun and we're gonna go hopefully try to some pigeon I'd appreciate if you were able to watch this all the way through it would really help benefit the channel and let's see how it goes yeah hotel 20 minutes half an hour before we leave here and get into the next field okay what's it here first yeah for 20 minutes yeah and then yeah let's do it yeah and they'll just be flying off bike that's close you weren't over here Denis something

no it's fine I just I thought I'd I thought you were going for those teeth no it's fine yeah I just saw them like that's a different flight bar you absolute net that went down like a stone but you definitely hit that clean is he coming back he was somewhere this could be fun

now I missed him did you find it maybe he was further over like here well done George me dinner sorted that's a good-sized Milan that size yeah I like ya Twilight good effort it wasn't ya always through this time of year yeah yes I know it's going faster than that no it's always been good - good good to see you could see - buddy I've missed the I missed some pigeon shooting missed quite P today but spots are in the wording - yeah with the trees countries have come in to roost yeah and we right place at the right time we reckon back in the season we'll get some that's a good sheet yes there's a good shot you