Bushcraft Fire Lighting: Fly Repellent

Description

In this video we look at a simple method of repelling flies by using an ember in some live moss. Many forms of fungi make great fly repellent.

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Video Transcription

hi guys it's mike from embassy keepers crafts here and i've been out in the woods today just on a bit of a walk and i've also been doing some filming and it's a very damp and humid day and the ground is crawling with flies they are everywhere

everywhere you look all you see are flies crawling all over the moss but the humidity is really amplifying the effects of this and the flies are almost unbearable in some respects especially when you're sitting down doing some filming or in the woods justing some carving trying to relax and sometimes you want to take some measures to try and get rid of those flies and this is what i've got here on my left hand side it's simply just a bit of cramp all funghi inside some moss and all it's doing is creating some plumes of smoke in the area and the Flies are all over the grounds but fortunately they're not on me anymore and it doesn't really even require this smoke to be blowing in my face for it to be effective it almost creates a dead zone of flies in the air around you and it's so effective especially when I've been in the woods carving for prolonged periods of time or in a camp setup and may not have had a fire going you can set these up periodically around the area and they burn quite happily this one's been going for about 20 minutes and it's a little bit worse for wear now we're starting to fall apart and need some maintenance but I thought in this video I'll show you how to make one this woodland I'm in is predominantly an ash woodland and ash is a particularly easy tree to identify it generally has very pale bark almost like a tan color and when young it's very smooth and as its older and gets very fast with diamond notches in it that run all the way up the trunk has very small leaves as well the little pine eight leaves that come off of a main stem and the twigs can be found below the tree on the floor they often very nobly and quite curvy and flexible and sometimes the buds can even be found and they look like little hooves but this video isn't really about identifying a shit just the particular ember or or funghi I'm using to produce an ember grows on dead ash on the deadfall that you can find on the ground and it's literally abundant in this woodland this everywhere

I pick up this bit of dad fool here you can see this is very typical of ash deadfall you've got peeling bark with a blackness beneath and you can almost spot it a mile off due to the contrast of it looks very different to a lot of other rotting logs you'll find in the woodland and if you look just here we have Dale DiLeo concentric ax or King Alfred's cake crumpled funghi coal funghi has a lot of common names and this is probably one of the most useful tenders that I have available to me in my part of the world there's an off the tree tinder to put a spark into with a Ferro rod even can be used with a flint and steel with a little bit of skill behind it but even though it's been dammed

with enough heat from a Ferro rod we can put some sparks into this and these look very very dry at this time of year it's very tricky to find ones in good condition because they generally reach maturity around the autumn time or they die in blacken and they remain on the tree for up to two years but also the new ones start to come through which are hard and brain if you are interested in identifying King Alfred's cake all dolled iliac concentric are in a bit more detail I'll put a link in the description to another video I've done that covers it in a lot more detail than this but really what you're looking for is a tinder that can produce a very hot ember and burn for a long period of time much like chaga fungus for example or foams foeman Terriers something that will burn quite happily for a long time inside the moss to transfer that heat to the actual bundle around it but let's take these and we'll put some sparks into them

these ones here look nice and dry if we just break them up a bit just increase that surface area that one they're soaking wet you get rid of him I'm soaking wet as well so we've got some here that look pretty good not quite as I say it's quite damp now we've got this one going we can transfer the Ember across to another one we can put this one aside there and do the same to another some heat comes off them so you'd have to be careful so those can be left there now for a little while we just need to grab ourselves some moss this woodland is absolutely covered in moss it's all over the ground in thick beds but it's very damp when it's on the ground and there's a lot of soil attached to it when I'm choosing moss just to burn very slowly I want it to be a little bit damp from its greenness not too dad or us it bursts into flames but I don't want the stuff off the ground because it's just got too much earth attached to it and it's very very damp it holds water very well moss which is one of its good points in in bushcraft but when you're actually burning it you don't really want it to be holding water and that's why I use the stuff on the sides of trees like this am I going to take a little bit because it takes a long time to grow and I don't like to take too much of it and sometimes I even take moss

from other areas of the grain that a look like this bit of disturbs and place it on the tree and it'll continue to grow there as well all you need to do now is open up your mas a bit pick up the cramp bulls and by now the cramp Bulls would have turned into fantastic embers and put all the little pieces in there just like this close it up I'll even use some of the other moss that I've burnt earlier on in the day and there's a few Tufts there that have come off this log we can open it up very slightly and just start putting a bit of air in there to get things going

and it starts making a roaring noise you know you're in business and you can even slow down your breath and there it is and generally what I tend to do after that it's just take a bit of cold just to secure it all together it will have a tendency to come apart on you you can just wrap a bit of cord rain can just see a little bit of smoke starting to come out the top of it now it's just started to get going and you can make quite a few of these things I generally put them up in the air to stop them burning the ground and they just gradually turned to ash and burn away if we just let this get going it should start producing quite a lot of smoke you can see this one's been burning for about 20 minutes now and it's starting to fall apart a better way to use them is to actually put them on a patch of mud or damp earth you know bare soil in that way they don't drop embers everywhere and they just produce smoke on the ground provided the winds going the right way you can get the benefit of that smoke drifting around your area to keep the flies at bay obviously one of these isn't required when you have a fire going but if you don't and you're in the woods carving and you just need a bit of respite for a little while while you're doing something it can be very useful and you can even take more steps with them there are lots of other plants that can be used alongside these kinds of things like yarrow tansy and fleabane but I tend to use the most abundant thing available to me which is this Moss that's growing all over the place here and it's nice and damp to a degree where it produces some thick smoke and keeps the flies away from me but I hope this video has been helpful and it's just a little technique that I use when I'm out in the woods doing something and I just want a break from the Flies so thanks for watching and hopefully I'll see you again in another video take care guys and I'll see you soon Cheers