A common wild edible that most Americans will run into in their travels, Amaranth is a good candidate for forage material to extend the life of your larder. This Eat the Weeds episode is a good starting point for identifying this venerable American food stuff:
Category Archives: Survival Skills
Catching and Cooking a Rat with Cody Lundin
This video was posted on the A.N.T.S Facebook page and features Cody Lundin of Dual Survival fame demonstrating some basic survival skills to a student at his Aboriginal Living Skill course. In theory. Cody himself admits that this clip was actually edited with Cody killing the rat before hand (mano-o-rato so to speak) then placing it under the dead fall to simulate the trapping. In real life a trap may sit for days without producing, or may produce minutes after you set it.You never know which is why in a survival situation it’s wise to run a line of traps.
Dale Martin’s The Trapper’s Bible (now available on Kindle) is the first book survivalists should read for their emergency trapping education.
But that doesn’t lessen the value of what is here. Rats are fast breeding, crop destroying, larder contaminating vermin that happen to be edible so when things go bad and you’re looking to find extra protein to ease the burden on your larder trapping and eating them is a good idea. If you’re out in the wild pack rats like the one in the video are harder to catch than their urban rat cousins, but just as plentiful. In this video Cody is building dead fall traps and using dried fruit as bait, but he’s going primitive on this.
You can buy rat traps at any grocery (or right here) to pack in your survival pack. I would drill a hole in the traps if they don’t have one for a way to secure the trap into the ground or in a tree, etc. I’ve heard of people catching squirrel by putting peanut butter in the back of a coffee can and a rat trap put inside, but my rat traps are too big to work in my Cafe Du Monde cans so this might be a tall tale.
Notice after skinning and cleaning the little pack rat had a surprising amount of meat on it. They are still small and Lundin leaves the heart, lungs and liver in. Assuredly for extra nutrition. This is the whole process from killing to eating which those of you who have never caught, butchered and eaten a creature should watch until you can stop flinching. Enjoy:
How to Set Up a Primitive Camp
I am a big fan of historical trekker and living history enthusiast “Le Loup” who runs the excellent re-enactment blog A Woodsrunner’s Dairy. “Primitive” survival skills are something people should try to develop if they truly believe (as I do) that a collapse will mean an eventual return to a 19th century quality of life. Many people who plan on “bugging out” should also look into the skills taught by historical trekkers who are used to traveling light and without modern conveniences, and people bugging in may find themselves on the Long Hunt in the search for food where these skills will be useful.
Le Loup made this video of him setting up a woodsrunning camp using tools that our colonial ancestors would have been familiar with. He also has photos of the finished camp posted. A camp set up like this makes a fine spring/summer and maybe fall camp depending on where you live and requires very little material carried on your person.
Le Loup is using oil cloth for the shelter, which is not the same oil cloth you find on Amazon but the more authentic cotton duck coated with Linseed oil. I found good instructions for making oil cloth here if you’re so inclined. Since you’re not going for authenticity but survival you should use what you can find that’s affordable, durable and easy to pack.
While a flint and steel set up is nice, I recommend you carry several modern ignition sources with you, including plain old Bic lighters and wooden matches. A tinder box is an excellent idea that we can take from the past, though we would use different tinder than the woodsrunners of yore. You can buy modern tinder but frankly dryer lint makes nice tinder and you should be cleaning out your trap anyway. It burns fast so many people recommend combining it with other tinder, like a Vaseline soaked cotton ball which should be carried separately, of course. If you have a first aid kit (and you should) put a little Vaseline in it and you can eliminate the cotton balls by applying it to the lint giving it a much longer burn time.
I highly recommend the books Wildwood Wisdom and Nessmuk’s Woodcraft and Camping for people looking for references on traditional, low tech wilderness skills.
Survival Resource Link Dump
I’ve been taking time off for a few days as I do every 9/11. Here’s a bunch of links that I think are useful but never got around to writing full posts about:
I have always maintained that the collapse of America will look more like Argentina than Patriots. After a news report about the plague of strong arm robberies on ATM users Ferfal at Surviving in Argentina posted his 12 tips to safely using ATMs. My wife and I used some of these precautions in NYC.
Gabe Suarez writes about the utility of pistol caliber carbines as opposed to rifles and pistol which is well worth a read if you are thinking of a gun purchase.
Viking Preparedness has an article called Hunker Down which supports my view that bugging in is the only way to really survive an emergency. I don’t agree with his pessimism, but I do take issue with the optimism of the people who think they will pack a bag, run off somewhere and survive in a alien environment.
Rasch Outdoor Chronicles has a two part post on hog hunting guns. With the explosion of feral hogs in this country the ability to put down one of these creatures should factor into your gun and ammunition purchases. This feral hog drift map shows where they are concentrated, but you’ll notice that hogs have been spotted in NJ and New Hampshire and many sightings in Michigan. Part I. Part II.
Cat Ellis has a podcast up on how to make the materials necessary to make candles, including information on processing beeswax and making wicks from wild cotton.
Outdoor Life has a online piece called The Predator Boom which gives you information on which predator populations have grown to sizes big enough to begin to threaten wild game populations, and you.
Via Modern Stronghold there’s a article in the Marine Corps University Journal on Feral Cities (starts on pg 50) that talks about how cities go feral. New Orleans after Katrina is included in the list of feral cities. Well worth a read to see what planners expect from our large cities in the event of a collapse and to give you an idea of how to prepare for living near one. Frankly Chicago is quickly becoming a feral city.
Here’s a video I found on what a raccoon snare should look like. Raccoons are a pest that you’ll need to deal with, can be eaten (but are disgusting) but more importantly the skin can be sold or traded. The prices on the fur market are pretty depressed and I believe will remain so for some time but you can still get $5-25 dollars per skin depending on quality. Get a book or DVD on fur handling and a good skinning knife. If society devolves as some suspect furs will be a valuable commodity and raccoons will be a dangerous nuisance that gardeners, pet and livestock owners and people with children cannot afford to keep around.:
Tips on Surviving a Home Invasion
This clip is from a show called Shooting Gallery that runs on The Outdoor Channel which my lousy cable company doesn’t carry. However there are clips of the shows floating online which are chock full of good advice. This is a quick clip (a little over 7 minutes)that talks about civilian techniques of surviving a home invasion. Watch it a couple of times because there’s a lot here, including gun placement, when you should clear a room and why in most cases not stay put in a fortified position is a bad idea: