Wild Food + Animal Tracks and Signs

Hello there, welcome back. As my channel this year and forever onward is going to have a much more outdoorsy sort of feel to it, I thought I would just take this opportunity to head out into my back fields and local woodland, see what I can find, see what I can film and explain a little bit about the things that I find and film. I may not find anything, in which case I will now edit this out and I would have just been talking to myself. Hopefully we'll find something. Let's go. Here's a really beautiful plant called Lady's Smock, comes out in flowers early season. Can be anything from reasonably dark purple through to white. Seems to change from area to area. Don't know whether that's based on the soil or the moisture content of the soil or what. That's a really nice plant. And apparently the leaves of this can be used in salads. I've tried them before though. Very hot, quite a peppery taste, a little bit like watercress. Quite nice actually. Well we haven't got away from the bog yet and we've got another edible plant. This is common sorrel, Rumex acatosa. It gets about 18 inches, 2 feet tall, which is roughly 45 to 60 centimetres. And these leaves are very bitter, but they can, at the right time of the year, be quite nice. They're very nice. Early season leaves, very nice. Tastes very much like a new beech leaf, if you've ever tasted them. Zesty. Here's another two wild edibles. We've got nettles, which you really don't want to eat raw. Make nettle soup out of that. And we've also got brambles. Which are absolutely awful when they get their thorns into you, because they fester up something terrible, but they have beautiful fruit in the autumn. And just under this gorse bush here, we've got something called bugle, which early season gets a lovely, almost orchid-like flower. Very dark blue, has waxy leaves. It's a spreading plant, and it does well in pretty dry areas, but it's better known for being a bogland plant. Now I'm not sure how well this is going to come out on film, but here we've got a lovely rabbit run through this long grass. And the reason I can tell it's rabbits is because we've got rabbit muck there. A very convenient hanging place here, if we ever wanted to snare them, if you were into hunting and trapping, you'd need it to catch a meal. But everything we're going for at this run, if you can see it, I'm sure you'll appreciate that. It's a good one. I've been none too quiet up to this point. I've been talking in a normal tone. I've been talking to the camera, I've been trudging through bog, but there's a big rabbit set behind me. Haven't seen any rabbits yet, so I'm hoping to show you some, and I'm going to try and call them out of that set. I've just realised I'm pretty much shouting now, 20, 25 yards away from the set maybe, so there's a good chance they'll be able to hear me. I'm just going to be sitting in plain view of the set, and using nothing but finger, lips, a little bit of spit, going to try and squeak them out. Top of the set. He actually came running out of the rushes to see what was going on. Wanted to shoot that for a meal. It's well within range of an air rifle. Bit of a manky-looking rabbit, but I'm sure it would make a fine meal. I'll just zoom out and let you see how far away I am from this. Looks a long way on film, but it's not that far at all. A decent air rifle would easily take that out. Alternately, if you weren't dying for a meal and didn't have to hunt rabbits, you might just want to get a good wildlife shot. It's a great way to get things to come close. Rabbits, any sort of predators that prey on rabbits, squeak, they'll come running straight to you. Best to stay hidden from predators, though, because they're a little bit more wary. Owls, all sorts of birds of prey, quite often you get those hovering right above you when you squeak. It's a great way to see wildlife very close. Cracking place here for rabbits lying up during the day. Got a run coming in here, one coming in from here, one coming in from here, all leading to this little place in the shade where the rabbit can get in, out of the sun, and just sit there in the fresh air. Excellent if you're a hunter and you're creeping around very quietly. It's quite often in here The rabbit will just sit and watch you walk straight past. You see it first, you've got a meal. The common buzzard catching the thermal there. Getting higher and higher and higher. And then it'll go off in search of something to eat. Here's another wild edible. This is a hazel tree, you get the hazel nuts in the back end of the year. Unfortunately in the UK we have millions and millions and millions of grey squirrels. They tend to strip the nuts off before they're ready. So you've got to be quick, or you've got to be lucky, or you've got to be in a place where the grey squirrels are trapped and controlled. And the bottom of the hazel trees are well known for producing very straight wood. This one never gets coppiced because it's in a pretty wild part of the wood, but you can cut them right back and they come away with loads of really beautifully straight pieces of wood. Actually, all the way around here, we've got this stuff, which is Himalayan balsam. It gets... Five, six feet tall, maybe more in places. In the late summer, it gets pods about that sort of length, about three, four centimetres. Inside those pods, loads of little seeds. The pod actually explodes when it touches something, fires its seeds all over the place. So this would have actually come from the river, a good quarter of a mile away. Every year, coming from a seed to an adult plant, boom, blowing the seeds all over the place, scattering them up the bank. Another plant, more seeds, boom. Spreading up the bank a little bit more. So in essence, I suppose if you knew how far one of these things could scatter its seeds, you could guess or estimate how long it would take to cover a quarter of a mile. But I'm not going to work that out. I almost forgot to mention, those pods in the back end of the ear are actually edible. They taste quite nutty. They're a lot better when the seeds are brown or just turning black. They're a little bit bitter when they're green but they're nice, pretty nice. I wouldn't eat loads of them though but me and the kids when we're out for a walk back end of the year we eat quite a lot and it's never killed us yet. See ya. Get in there, we're like a kid in a sweet shop. We've got goose grass, early season, is an edible. It's not particularly nice but it is edible and we've also got wood sorrel. Looks a little bit like a clover, yeah that's really not nice. Wood sorrel is nice, more so early season. You don't want to be eating it from summer and beyond because it's pretty awful. That's got an absolute, it's almost like a palette cleaning zest to it. That's lovely. And the wood sorrel gets tiny little white flowers with a yellow centre. Beautiful little plant and I think after eating that goose grass I'm gonna have some more of this to properly clean my palette. I'll call it. Here we've got a well-worked fox set. I'll show you what the holes are like in a minute But just here... Something's taking a leak here. It's only just soaked into the ground, and it's 100% fox. Daughty devils. Now, the two main holes have got bedding dragged into them, which makes me think there's cubs in here. What a beautiful set. I'll have a look around, and with it being mostly sand, I should be able to find a good print or two. I can't see any fox prints there. There's partial prints, but there's nothing really good enough to film. But here's a very good deer print. Look at that in there. You'd have to be blind to miss that one. Not 50 yards away from where we saw that deer track, here's more evidence of deer. This is approximately three feet off the ground and what I'm pretty sure has happened here is a deer with new antlers covered in velvet, like that, has wanted to get all that stuff off so it's been rubbing them on this rough bark to get rid of all the velvet from its antlers. We've got some magnificent beech trees around here. Just on the crest of this big bank side they get something called beech nuts. Which is almost like a horse chestnut in that you split it open and the nut's inside. It looks totally different to a horse chestnut though. That's it there. In the back end of the year, split these open, get little nuts out and they're edible. There's nothing in that one though. It is early season though so we'll have to wait a good six months before we get any more of these. Here we've got a little stream entering the main river and along the side of it we've got yet another wild edible. That one's called brook lime. It's actually sold in garden centers that one to put around ponds. It's also known as Veronica becabunga, and that has like a peppery taste, can be used in salads, and it's quite mild. I think I should have brought my fishing rod as well, because down here, it is absolutely alive with flies. The fish have gone berserk behind me. It's been the first warm day we've had in a good three weeks, and the fish are really responding. I'll see if I can get out of my duties tonight, and I might just come down here and film a fishing video. Now that's what I call a fly hatch. Why didn't I bring my fishing rod? Why? Surely this is going to be the last edible that I find on this trip. Because that seems to be all I'm doing. I'm just filming things that you can eat. But there's just so much out there. That's the very distinctive flower of garlic. Quite mild garlic. Flower's edible. Leaves are edible. And if you dig down you get quite a nice long bulb which is also edible. Just in case anybody's in any doubt what a garlic plant looks like, here's a textbook one. This is absolutely beautiful. Oh you crush the leaves and what an onion-y, garlic-y, chive-y smell you get from it. There you go, like a thickened root and that's garlic. Mild but it's got a real bite to it as well if that makes sense. Very garlicky that one. Now here's something a lot of people would have walked past, there's a fallen ash limb here and on here we've got a fungus which is called cramp ball You'll have probably seen this in one of my previous videos. This is one of the best tinders you can get for fire lighting. And all year it seems to stay dry. It's got a really hard exterior. It's almost like a little black golf ball. But when you get inside, it's almost like a charcoal cross with wood. Drop a spark in there and that burns so hot you can set practically anything on fire with it. Now unfortunately I've come out today with only my camera and phone. So I've got no way of lighting this. But if you're interested in seeing just what a great tinder this is, check my bushcraft and survival playlist on the channel. Look for one that is about cramp ball fungus. You'll find out all about this stuff. It's excellent. So much out there to get excited about. This is a fern, very waxy leaf, very dark green, grows in extremely shaded places. It's called heart's tongue fern. And as an ex-landscaper, this really excites me. This is perfect when you're building stone tunnels. You can put it in underneath the tunnel and it grows in a moist, dark environment. It's excellent to put in dry stone walls. Beautiful plant. Yeah, in pools like this, you might get the odd little trout. Six, seven inches long would be a monster. But it's not these pools that I'm interested in. It's something else. If you get migratory fish, especially sea trout, salmon, Coming up these little streams. There's one place you can really cash in. Here it is, just up here. Before we get there, we've got yet another wild edible. There's a tiny little stream coming down here from the bank side. And in it, we've got loads of watercress. There it is. You'll recognise that from a lot of the salads you buy in supermarkets. Very, very peppery. Totally different from anything else I've eaten so far today. Making me mouth water. You won't need much of that. Well behind me there is what I've been getting excited about from a survival point of view because it's only about 100 meters or 100 yards or thereabouts away from the main river but here we've got a pretty much unclimbable waterfall as far as fish are concerned. Reasonably nice deep-ish pool underneath it. A few days of heavy rain, water comes up, raging flood, fish come up, fish get stuck. Water drops, fish in pool, man comes along, fish for tea. Now I've no doubts that there will be one or two fish in here, but with the river so close and the river containing nice big fish, you wouldn't fish this stream in a conventional manner. You would use other means. I'll be showing you some of those other means in future videos, purely from a survival point of view, not from a fishing point of view, because it's basically just about catching the fish by any means necessary. So that will be coming up in future videos and some of the ideas are a little bit off the wall but they work. If ever you've made any bivvies or shelters outside, you know how awesome ferns are for covering it. These are only just coming out, they're still unfurling. These get really big, I don't know, three, four feet tall. Chop them off at the bottom, use them on the sides of your shelters, they keep it lovely and watertight. Oh, high up, do you see what I see? Ah, here's Here's a few more animal tracks and signs. Here we've got hazelnuts eaten by a little woodmouse. What a beautiful job it's done of that. Here we've got a big old toad. Look at that fella. Beautiful eyes on it. And apparently these lads can live for 40 years. I've just realised what time it is. I've got to go quick now. There's just so much to see that I've ran on a little bit. And I've got to be back home in about 20 minutes because my son's coming back from school very shortly. I hope you've enjoyed that little quick walk out into the woods fairly near my house. It's just nice to be able to show you beyond the garden, although the garden is pretty good and I do love being here, living here and indeed working here from home. It's always nice to get out along the river, up into the woods, up the streams and see what's about. We didn't see much wildlife, I think there was a toad and a rabbit, oh and a buzzard miles away and that was about it. But there was lots of tracks and signs and there was lots of wild food as well. So hopefully you've enjoyed this, I certainly enjoyed it, it was great exercise, and I got back just in time for my son coming back from school, so everything worked out perfect. Thanks very much for watching, I'll catch you in the next video.