Great Bushcraft Skills

Just an update to highlight a free video resource full of great bushcraft skills - whether you are new to bushcraft or an old hand. There's some great material here. Lots of useful, practical and well thought-out tips and tricks. Paul Kirtley has added a few new videos to his YouTube channel, such as the one below but you can go to his blog to get more videos for free. A great, free resource... This video is one of my favourites:

 

Packing Kit For a Bushcraft Course

I just came across this video on YouTube of BlueJay packing equipment to go on a foundational one-week bushcraft course.

It's a little long but I think it is useful.

What Happens on a Bushcraft Course

Frontier Bushcraft have added this video of their Elementary Wilderness Bushcraft course to their YouTube channel.

The video demonstrates what typically occurs on a good quality bushcraft course as well as how they are run:

Why You Should Take a Bushcraft Course

What is Bushcraft?

Bushcraft consists of a very wide selection of abilities. At the center of bushcraft is an awareness of nature. This understanding of the natural world informs a sensibility and skill base that makes it possible to live - not just survive - in a natural environment.

Someone versed in the many skills of bushcraft does not need masses of equipment. In reality the opposite is true. Since bushcraft is built on a knowledge of which resources in a specific environment can provide for our basic human wishes the true exponent of bushcraft needs nothing aside from nature.

Bushcraft is carried in your brain and your muscles. It weighs nothing. The practice of wilderness bushcraft is one that includes the supply of shelter, fire, food, water and tools as well as wayfinding, or the practice of navigating by natures signs.

The modern term bushcrafting mainly applies to the hobbyist bushcraft practitioner - or bushcrafter as they are coming to be known - who predominantly practices their abilities close to home instead of in an outback setting.

While the exponent of bushcraft skills in it's purest form wishes nothing except nature, tools and clothing have been necessary to man for millenia. Today we have got the selection of whether we make our own or buy them, and many of us take the choice of trading for them.

The flexible exponent of modern wilderness bushcraft selects tools that make the best of their bushcraft skills. The most commonly useful bushcraft tool is a modest fixed-blade knife that's easily maintained and can be put to numerous uses. Other cutting tools that might be chosen, dependent on the environment are an axe, a saw or a machete or parang.

Why Take a Bushcraft Course?

If bushcraft skills are part of our natural heritage as humans living in the wilderness, why will we need to be taught these talents on a course? Well the answer is blindingly obvious - most human beings live in urban or suburban environments, far removed from living close to nature, let alone relying on it for daily survival.

Bushcraft courses provide a methodical schooling in a range of abilities that would be passed down from generation to generation. Bushcraft skills are generally taught in a way that suits our modern understanding of the Earth and dovetails with scientific data in relation to such subjects as pathogenic organisms and water purification.

While it is possible to learn lots of the skills of bushcraft from books, getting them to a high enough standard to depend on them would take a substantial period of trying, failing and trying again.

The safest way of learning things such as edible wild plants and fungi is from a professional instructor; the most highly effective technique of learning fire lighting abilities, particularly friction fire lighting techniques is from a reputable bushcraft training provider.

Taking a course in bushcraft skills accelerates the training process. You are benefiting from the experience of others and cutting out the frustration - and possible danger - of getting things wrong. Each generation of our ancestors did not learn every single skill from first principles by trial and error; they learned their bushcraft skills from talented practitioners. This is still the simplest way to learn and the simplest way for most individuals to access such skilled folks is to enrol in a bushcraft course.