Survival Tips - #2 - Tinder Dust from Fungus

Hi there, welcome back, and in this video, this tips video, I'm going to be showing you how you can make your own fire dust. Now everybody on the planet can light a fire somehow, whether it's with matches or a lighter, or cotton wool, petrol soaked things, but there's something special about lighting a fire with natural ingredients, so that's what I'm going to show you today. Now the fungus we're looking for grows particularly, particularly on ash trees. That's a trunk of an ash tree, lovely and rough. They tend to grow very straight, they're a really fast-growing tree and I'll just show you the leaves so you're familiar with the leaves. That's what it's like looking up at an ash tree, see it's quite, the shade's quite dappled under here and the leaves are very different to oak. Here's some nice convenient ones, young ash trees, you see these on the forest floor, you know there's some big adult trees somewhere producing these fellas, that's the leaves And that's him from underneath. Now these fungus are very easy to track down but you need to know what your trees are because they grow predominantly on dying ash trees and also on the broken off limbs of ash trees that litter the forest floor. You really need to be somewhere where there's ash growing so you need to recognize the different trees. I've showed you a couple of ways to recognize the ash but familiarize yourself with trees and that will give you a head start. Now you're not looking for the saplings, you're looking for big mature trees 40-50 feet tall. Ones with huge big branches hanging out because they fall off from time to time and when they fall on the ground they grow these fungus very very well. Behind me we've got I've got such a tree. So I'm going to have a look around that to see if there's any fallen branches. And on there, there should be some of our fungus. Ah, now unfortunately this is from a managed woodland, so the big branch that's fallen off that tree a few years ago has actually been chopped up and left here. It may have cracked in firewood, but I presume it's been left here for the wildlife, beetle grubs and so on, you know. Nevertheless, it's got our fungus on it. That's what we're looking for. Little hard, almost like little burnt cakes. Hence the name, Alfred's Cakes. And inside them you can see it's bone dry, it's almost like charcoal that you'd use for a barbecue and that takes a spark beautifully. So we're going to take a few of these, put them in our bag and they will make a lovely dust for lighting fires. Because these have got like a hard shell on them almost, with a softish interior, you'll find that even after hard rain, the rain just washes off here and the inside is normally dry enough to take a spark. So these are a great one if you're hunting for something to light a fire in the wet. There's loads of them all over the place. That bag is probably half full already. Now if you can recognise ash trees you can find the fungus. Loads of big ash trees in here, therefore they're pretty old, they're dropping branches, there's branches lying all over the place, there's half trees lying all over the place and they're absolutely laden with this marvellous fungus. Beautiful. Now here's a huge fallen tree here which has been cut up, but you'll notice there's nothing at all grown on that. That one's an oak. I think that'll do. I'm going to get out of this wood now and move to somewhere more favourable for filming because it's very dark in here. Here's a quick example of just how well these fellas take a spark. Watch this. Wonderfully hot. As you can see, you can get a fire going from that, no problem at all. Basically all I do, I take the dry pieces of fungus, crush them up roughly. We don't want it like a proper dust, it wants to be like a very coarse dust, like that, and we just put them inside our little containers, pack it right down inside of there. Now you'll probably be thinking that that dust is just going to burst into flames when you drop a spark on it, but it doesn't. It tends to smoulder. Yeah. Yeah. It's not actually as easy to light as the fungus itself. I'll be right back. Thank you. Thank you. No problem. You've really got to make sure that this is very dry, Thanks, man. Thank you. because you're going to be storing it in something that's more or less watertight. And if the water can't get in, then moisture can't get out. So you really need to dry this stuff first before you store it. When you do store it, I mean, you can see, that is going to take a spark beautifully. This stuff isn't quite dry, so I'm not going to use it yet. And when you've put these together, and if your stuff's dry, which this really isn't, if you go like that, it really packs it down tight. Look at that. That was three quarters full, and it's gone down to maybe a third full, possibly a quarter. Just keep dropping more stuff in. There you go. That's packed in, there's enough dust there for numerous fires. Just a quick note on these containers, these are actually for needles, they're called needle containers and I bought these from eBay. You can see they're ridged on the sides there and that allows them to be locked out in different positions for different sized things. You could get a little fishing kit in there, you can certainly use it for tinder, put matches in here. They're really versatile for your survival kit. I think I bought them in a pack of 12 and they weren't expensive, but they are very, very good. So the Dust, married with these little containers, makes an excellent addition to your survival kit. Thanks very much for watching. I'll catch you in the next video. I'm starting to speak now. It's wintering.