Undercurrents - The A to Z of Bushcraft

Undercurrents is a production company with a focus on social and environmental justice issues. Specialising in films reflecting the global counter-culture. They are a non-profit company working with video makers from communities who have been marginalised or overlooked by TV broadcasters.
They've been working with the charismatic Andrew Price, founder of Dryad Bushcraft to create this series of short films. I like them and think their efforts deserve a wider audience. See what you think.
Thanks for reading
Bushwacker.

Saw Feelings

Axes may give you more of a ‘woody woodsman’ feeling, but in most situations saws are a lot more practical. Especially if your trying to introduce the little people to the big outdoors. Saws let kids make a sizable contribution to the woodpile without scaring the living crap out of adult observers.

It’s been a while since I’ve prattled on about the horrific cost of living in ‘Rip Off Britain’… and its also time for your pal the bushwacker to help himself to a nice fat slice of humble pie.

A while ago I sang the praises of the BCB commando saw. Well I’ve had a change of heart. I couldn’t tell you why, but when outdoors I’d always preferred saws where both ends of the blade are secured. I don’t know why but I’ve taken it as an article of faith.

In support of this belief I have painstakingly filed the teeth of a cumbersome bow saw to vicious sharp (took ages) and wrapped the blade in cardboard for transportation. Then I moved over to the BCB saw, dumping its brittle blades for a wire saw that either stretched or clogged and most of the time did both. It was light enough, but frustrating.

When I was given that well loved staple of British bushcraft the Bahco Laplander saw for crimbo (it arrived a little after) I got to put my own BS (belief systems!) to the test. The scales fell from my eyes. This is one design classic that is actually worth its reputation. Really, it rocks!

Here in northern europe many of us have a built in preference for Swedish kit, it’s the land of top notch outdoor tools and clothing. Its tools like the Trangia, Laplander and fallkniven’s F1 that reinforce the prejudice.

First impressions of the Laplander:
The design is beautifully obvious, the Laplander convincingly locks shut as well as open. No more cardboard to protect the contents of my bag.
It weighs the sum total of ‘nack all’ (I couldn’t find the kitchen scales but it really is light).
Very, very sharp teeth, cleverly set to avoid clogging and binding. I once read a review that claimed the blade was made of two different thickness of steel wielded together, with the teeth cut from the thicker piece. I’ve not been able to verify this, but the teeth certainly leave a wide cut. I’ve not tried it on bone yet but I’m expecting great things.
The teeth nearest the handle are redundant, and if it were my design I might have chosen to put a choi there instead. The handle has a bit of flex to it but two things reassured me; its cold enough in Sweden to mean that plastics have to be chosen for their resilience in the cold, if a little flex is the price of not becoming brittle it’s a fair exchange. The other thing that gave me confidence is they sell replacement blades! When a tools is this cheap it usually just means disposable, I’m starting to suspect that in this case it mean that users have found that the handle lasts.

In the UK the best price I’ve seen is £20 inc delivery from Camelot Outdoor with the average being about £23 plus delivery. As usual being ‘just down the road’ from Sweden has no bearing on the prices we pay.
The good news if you’re in north America (or you’ve sorted out a means of shipping) is Bushcraft North West have the same saw made in the same factory just with a red Kershaw logo. It comes in at a measly $25 (£12.50p)! At that price you don’t have to take my word for it.

EDIT NEW BEST PRICE IS ONLY £13.49

Thanks for reading
Bushwacker

PS for a side by side comparison
PPS my cameras out of batteries, picture from camelots website

Bushwacker Edu. - A Knotty Problem

As James pointed out the other day, unless you come from a family who hunt or live in a small community where everyone knows everyone else, your chances of getting involved in hunting in the UK are relatively slim. The net result is that there are a few holes in my education.

John: Hey, Jeremy, what do you know about holes?
Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD.: There are simply no holes in my education.
Paul: You mean you haven't composed a "hole" book?
The Beatles - The Yellow Submarine

James has invited me to go Ferreting in a couple of weekends time. As you can imagine I’m fairly excitable at the best of times, so he’d no sooner invited me than I was starting my preparations.
“Apart from my hat & coat what will I need to bring?”
“We’ll need some Purse Nets”
“Where do I buy them?
“Your making them – a kit’s in the post”
“ How difficult is it?”
“ Just one Knot, tied lots of times!”

So I’m about to start making some purse nets that we’ll stretch over the exits to the rabbits warren, before sending in his business of ferrets to flush the bunnies out.

Wish me luck - thanks for reading
SBW

Really Actually Tasty?

Much to my surprise the office has yielded a lesson in preparedness and survival this week.

Due to the early January lull when the rest of the world seems to still be on holiday. Last weeks office life was at a much slower pace than could be productive. The morning football conversation extended beyond its mandatory 20 minutes and peaked on Friday at an hour and a half.
Work, as it was, centered around half-hearted researching, most of the day went on teasing each other and reading stuff out from the internet.
One viral email caught everyone’s attention and made me think about the nature of our dinner and our expectations of it.

LOOKS GOOD

EASY TO COOK

PLENTY OF THEM ABOUT TOO!!


As we watched to squeals of horror, the question everyone was asking, well more shrieking than asking, was ‘Would you? – Could you!”.
Mr. Bojangles (the resident song and dance man) has lived in Senegal for ten years so he speaks with an authority the others cant muster.
“In lots of the parts of the world people eat all kinds of stuff”
Would you? Have you? You didn’t!
“I wouldn’t be surprised if I had, in a lot of places people just need to eat, you never know what you’re being served ”

In the Southern US and much of eastern europe squirrels are well known as good eating, a few people shoot them to eat here, and a couple of the more adventurous London restaurants have them on the menu.

Well they call squirrels ‘tree rats’, maybe these fellas should be re-branded as ‘ground squirrels’. Hmmmm?

Thanks for reading
Bushwacker.

I Want One - A Not So Occasional Series Pt2

I keep having a fantasy where there's erhm 'less of me to love' and as the weather warms up I'm thinking a bike ride to and from the office would be a step in the right direction. i could fix up my forgotten bike from the back of the shed, but it needs a lot of new parts, or i could use the inspiration of a gleaming new machine as impetus.
Or i could keep it legal by putting the money towards paying my tax bill...... Ho Hum

Whatever you decide to do with the new year, i hope it works out better than you intended. Or as the heyoka's heyoka once said
"May you live in interesting times - and get to be a part of them"
SBW
CHARGE a very cool bike co.

Easily Forage-able Resources. Online And In The Suburban Bush.

Every tribe or social grouping has its rituals and catchphrases, which let members identify each other, and let outsiders know they are outsiders. Sometimes these mantras set a frame of context, making sense of a situation and sometimes they serve to remind you how to do the business in challenging circumstances.

For as long as there’s been a fireside to return to at night, there’s been bush-lore passed on verbally by the light of the campfire, and now there’s the Bushcraft-Blog-Law. The law that dictates how a new tradition develops its tried and tested formulas, conventions and clichés. Leaving aside (for the moment), the obligatory pictures of knives, axes and hats that most of has used as symbols for our adventures. Every bushcraft blog must also pass on some timeless wisdom:
‘The-more-you-know-the-less-you-carry’.
Usually attributed to that wise old man of the hills Mors Kochanski.
Or if you wanted to ‘freshen up’ your pitch (or create your own trademark) it could
‘Make-up-for-what-you-don’t-have-with-what-you-do-know.’

As a culture develops there are also powerful totems which when invoked through stories and songs will provide insight and inspiration. Some people will find themselves wondering what Ray Mears would do. The wit and whiles of the coyote have served as a signpost to thinking beyond the expected in many North American cultures. In South Dakota I often wondered how BoB would have approached the task in hand and by emulating him was able to pass myself off as competent camper rather than reveal myself as a tubby desk jockey from the ‘burbs. But if I were to choose a guardian deity for suburban bushcraft it would have to be Wimbledon’s most famous residents…

I used to spend a lot of time with a really clever management consultant, who ran mind-bending workshops. A sort of Tobermory of consultancy, fixing up (and super charging) broken projects with stuff he found lying around. One of the really cool things that he taught us to do was, to see familiar behaviours (individual and organisational) as processes. Then to look at the process we’d uncovered in new and unexpected ways, until we could see other examples of when and where the behaviour or system attribute could perform another purpose. A bit like bushcraft and survival skills and of course just like the Wombles….

‘Making good use of the things that we find,
Things that the everyday folks leave behind.’

I really was starting to think that I’d seen all the bushcraft blogs of note, when I saw that a guy who posts on one of the bushcraft sites as Fenlander had started one, and its the best I’ve seen in ages. While most bloggers are enthusiastic amateurs afield (or incompetents-a-couch in the case of your pal the bushwacker) – This guy is skilled AND enthusiastic, what the Kiwis call ' a good keen man', check out the post where he and a pal test out the insulation provided by some woolen clothes. Brrrrr!!

As Fenlander demonstrates when the really skilled bushcrafters are out in the backcountry they find new uses for the thing that they find, stuff everyday folks would leave behind. Sadly my backcountry is more, well, suburban back-yard and it’s not so much things left behind, as crap folks throw over my back fence (everyday).

Look everyone SBW’s made a lantern!
(Without spilling any blood or severing a finger!!)

Meanwhile at the other end of the performance curve - Fenlander’s made a distress whistle that, ‘in a pinch’, could save your life.

Thanks for reading
Bushwacker

Ferreting Out Some Advice

I recently met with my new friend James Marchington editor of Sporting Shooter magazine.

If I had tried to imagine a quintessential English journalist afield, it would be James. Tweed jacket, spectacles and an encyclopedic knowledge of everything to do with guns and field sports. Sitting in his office surrounded by shotgun cartridges, rare books about deer stalking, ferreting and wildfowling he beguiled me with tales of life afield, cleared up numerous questions I had about firearms, their legislation, and the UK shooting fraternity. I had ‘popped in’ to see him for ‘half an hour’ and two and a half hours later I had to excuse myself so as to put in a token appearance at my own office. Wish I were still there.

James has kindly offered to induct me into the wiles and ways of the shooting gent, starting with an invitation to go ferreting for rabbits. With the proviso that I wouldn’t have to put any ferrets down my trousers, I enthusiastically accepted.

Ferrets? Rabbits? Trousers? What?
One very effective way of hunting rabbits is to flush them out of their holes by sending a ‘business’ of ferrets down there (great collective noun isn’t it).
You simply net off all the exits you can find and send a hob (male) and a jill (female) down the hole. When the rabbits come charging out into the net you kill them and eat them.

I’m from the south and you hear a lot of tall tales about the northerners and their strange rituals and antics. There has long been a folk legend about gentlemen of the northern persuasion using that that was intended for legs, as a storage place for these most able of helpers. Now it turns out that it’s true!! There really is a ‘sport’ called ‘ferret legging’ where you trouser ferrets and the last one to tear their own pants off in sheer terror is the winner. Probably more fun to watch than take part.

“Basically, the contest involves the tying of a competitor's trousers at the ankles and the subsequent insertion into those trousers of a couple of peculiarly vicious fur-coated, foot long carnivores called ferrets. The brave contestant's belt is then pulled tight, and he proceeds to stand there in front of the judges as long as he can, while animals with claws like hypodermic needles and teeth like number 16 carpet tacks try their damnedest to get out.”

The rules:"no jockstraps allowed. No underpants-nothin' whatever. And it's no good with tight trousers, mind ye. Little bah-stards have to be able to move around inside there from ankle to ankle."

For those of you without the inclination to read the full text here’s the punch line

The current record stands at an awesome 5 hours and 26 minutes!

Thanks for reading
SBW

PS One ferret, Freddie, is registered as an electrician's assistant with the New Zealand Electrical Workers Union.

Photo Credit

Tis Still The Season To Be Silly, Sigh........

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Baron Suburban Bushwacker the Bewildered of Middle Witchampton Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

Still in the office, not a lot happening here today
SBW

Tis The Season To Be Silly

There's more!

Christmas Card From Rex At The Deer Camp Blog

Where Rex blogs it's Christmas everyday!
The Deer Camp in question is at the Christmas Place Plantation Hunting Club, on the edge of the Mississippi Delta.
Happy Christmas Rex

SBW.

PS in case your wondering I'm four up and one in from the bottom right corner, wearing the hat.

How Many Ways Shall I Compare BoB To A Battered Trangia?

As the times and my tastes have changed, I’ve had a few different lives, each of them symbolised by a ‘trademark’ item. Some people I know well from office life have never seen me not wearing my trademark old school pinstripe suits, that bushcraft knife was witness to many a boyhood adventure in the wilds. The rogue floppy shows great promise as a trademark of adventures yet to come.

Luke Skywalker had his Light Sabre, Mors Kochanski has his Mora, and Ray Mears has his Woodlore. If there’s one thing I’ll always associate with BoB (or inspector gadget as he was known in the day) it’s the Trangia field cooker.

It’s a sigil for the man himself - you can get something that’s a little bit shinier, more fashionable, one that maybe boils a little faster, a little lighter, more ‘technical’ even. But when you want one that ‘is what it is’ and will never ever let you down the Trangia is yer man.

For 75 years the Swedish company has been making these simple pressed aluminum and brass field cookers. Cheap to keep, utterly dependable, and with a zero failure rate. BoB and the Trangia are a reflection of each other.

For about 20 of those years BoB has been carting them into some of the most inhospitable places this planet has to offer to heat some of the worst grub served by mortal man. As our mum said “ I have two sons, one eats to live, the other lives to eat”
With that in mind I’m starting a series of posts about trail food too go to feed to a dog.

Thanks for reading
Bushwacker.

Picture credit and stove review

Hmmm ‘Bushwacker'...........

I’ve been wearing some ‘city camo’ today in an attempt to pass myself off as one of the migrating herds of worker ants that make their way from the dormitory suburbs into the city each morning. I managed to escape the true horror of it all my riding in on my scooter instead of taking the train, but the city is a horrid experience. The whole self-perpetuating madness of it all really struck me, as I watched people try to alleviate the pain of the exercise by drinking £4 ($8!!) cups of frothy coffee which they will later pay to sweat off in the gym. Madness!!

I’ve worked with most of the guys I’ve joined before, so we spent a while chewing over the industry gossip and re-telling war stories for the benefit of the new guys. Well OK, we retold them for our own benefit and the new people got to listen.

On they way back home I reminded myself that I wasn’t immune to the insanity either, as I started to think of all the new stuff I would buy to convince myself that I really am an outdoorsman and hunter rather than another termite working to build the mound.

I owe I owe its off to work I go, I owe I owe it’s off to work I go……..

Bushwacker

Free Money - For What Its Worth

My blog is worth $11,855.34.
How much is your blog worth?

I saw this on the deptford dames blog and trying it out for myself was flattered to see that my blog has a value other than the entertainment it gives me and a few of you. Because the value is derived from the blogs technorati ranking I've just increased the deptford dames worth by mentioning her.

Thanks for reading
SBW

Hunter Angler Gardener Cook Joins My Blog Roll

Hunter Angler Gardener Cook has left this comment on a post

Bushwacker: I see it as my goal in life to get those who turn their noses up at game meats to shed their hang-ups and give it another go. If you ever need recipes for whatever it is you bring home this week, I have a fairly monstrous collection of wild game cookbooks and have a few tricks up my sleeve to make the wary drop their guard and pick up their forks...

His blog Honest Food: Finding the Forgotten Feast has made a great start, I'm looking forward to reading more, check him out!

Told you you wouldn't need to buy the papers this weekend!
bushwacker.

Dawgs 'n' Hawgs

Mr Rasch continues his outdoor chronicles with a great tale about hunting a giant razorback in the company of some specially bread hounds.
Go on you can take the trash out later, sit for a spell.......
Bushwacker

Picture credit: If you thought the skull looked mad read the article it came from!

Swedish Survival Skills

I’ve been meaning to recommend Michel Blomgren and his site Bushcraft.se for a while. Not only is he very knowledgeable about the skills that will keep you comfortably alive should you get lost while in the forest, but he’s also a talented TV presenter who is not afraid to suffer, if it means imparting some knowledge.

If you do nothing else make sure you watch Episode 1 - Five points survival.
It could save you life, it will make an overnight stay in the woods more comfortable, and if you are trying to get your kids into the outdoors the skills he demonstrates are so simple you could be teaching them to your kids by this weekend. Genius!

Enjoy
Bushwacker

Jonah – The Boy Done Good

My old mate Jonah has made it back in one piece from his yacht master training voyage.
How delicious does his catch look!
Good to see you back mate.
SBW

Hungry? You Will Be!

I'm adding a new cookery section to my blog roll.
I'd like to introduce you to Kevin Kossowan, hunter, butcher, forager, bon viveur and chef. He has done some great posts, and believes in honouring his prey by eating it 'nose-to-tail'.

It was wonderful to read that I'm not the only person obsessive enough to use a metal detector to take shot out of game birds.

Gotta go - I'm starving

Full Bore Fool

While we’re on the subject of shotguns, how much of a numpty is this guy?

Picture the scene if you will. A grown man of 66 years of age is trying to undo the last nut that holds one of the wheels on to his vehicle. Frustrated by its stubborn refusal to come undone, he reaches not for a can of penetrating and easing oil, but for a shotgun.
Because stupid is as stupid does, he fires the shotgun loaded with 00 buckshot at the wheel while standing next to it. With inevitable results.

You couldn’t make it up.
SBW

Picture from

Hunting Birds or should that be Birds Hunting?

I’ve started following a really neat blog where a grade ‘A’ foodie from northern California, who didn’t grow up around hunting, has taken up wildfowling and bird hunting. At the start of her adventure she suspects that being a woman taking up a male dominated activity will be the hard part….
Between the lunkheads and the professionally patronising, she finds the same challenges we all face when going into the great outdoors; finding clothes to protect us from the worst the weather can throw at us, weapons and tools that consistently do the business when asked, and someone to show us how to get a result.
Nor Cal Cazadora sites some recent research showing that while hunter numbers are down, the number of women afield is rising, and rising significantly.
Except at my house.
I’m forever trying to sell Mrs SBW the benefits of eating wild meat and hunting for it ourselves, she remains unconvinced. Meanwhile on the other side of the world BoB (brother of bushwacker) is married to a woman made of sterner (and more weatherproof) stuff. When Mrs SBW was pregnant she wanted to: reorganise storage and redecorate the house. When Mrs BoB was in the family way it was a different story. Just before they left for New Zealand, we all got together for a family dinner. At the table I saw her staring dreamily at a Sunday roast saying wistfully, “when I get home I really want to shoot a pig” Mrs SBW further endeared herself (although not to me) when she pointed at me and chipped in “you can shoot this one if you like”.

Thanks for reading
Bushwacker.


Translation ‘Birds’ is english for ‘Chix’
Photo Credit