Survival Skills: Orienteering

In a world of fancy GPS units, it seems the map and compass are going the way of the dinosaur. Still, in a pinch, a compass and a topography map cost almost nothing and can save your life just as well. Save yourself over a hundred dollars on a handheld GPS and pick up this antique but useful skill.

Orient the map

The first thing you need to do with a map is lay it out in the “correct” direction. That is to say, North on the map should be North on the compass. It is comical to watch rookie navigators moving steadfastly in the wrong direction because they didn’t realize that the map turned when they turned. The map needs to have a single orientation, and this is by far the most important step.
With a topography map of your area, look for a spot that points toward North. You may need to adjust for the difference between magnetic North and actual North, and that will be noted on the map itself. With your compass, figure out which direction is magnetic North, and align the map’s magnetic North with the direction your compass says it should be.

Orient Yourself

Figure out where you are on the map. Hopefully, with the topography features on the map, you can figure it out fairly accurately. My favorite trick is to get on top of a hill, since the tops of hills are easiest to see on topography maps. Otherwise, use landmarks. Some estimation will be a given, but it shouldn’t matter too much if you are using your compass well enough.

With your oriented map, figure out which direction you want to travel in. Use your compass to figure out how many degrees off of North you will need to travel to get where you are going., and then you can fold your map up and follow the compass direction. The best way to do that is to pick an intermediate point that you can see in line with your compass direction. Walk to it, and then repeat the process of figuring out your direction.

Repeat Often

It is surprisingly easy to become turned around. Repeat the process as often as possible in order to make sure you are headed in the right direction. At night, this becomes extra difficult, so amateurs should probably bed down and travel again in the morning.

Blazing your own trail isn’t recommended, but in a pinch, it could be the difference between being stuck in the wilderness and getting home. Practice your skills at home in a park before you take them out into the field. Topography maps are readily available online, in libraries, or from the government, so getting one for your area should be reasonably simple. Have fun with your new skills, and enjoy your time in the wilderness.

Survival Skills: Build a Shelter

Shelter is one of our primitive needs. No matter where you are, having a place to get out of the sun, rain, snow, or wind will be important. Building a shelter in most areas is as simple as being observant and using everything you have to work with.

Sticks and Leaves

The most common shelter I’ve built has been the sticks and leaves shelter. This shelter goes up pretty quickly and anyone can do it. Find a large tree, rock, or log, and begin to lean sticks across it. You will form a rough lean-to structure with your first sticks. Then add a layer of leaves, and then another layer of sticks. Repeat the process, using anything you can including mosses and mud, to make a shelter that is rain resistant and sturdy. This shelter takes only an hour to prepare, even for a novice.

Common mistakes when building this shelter are typically just that you picked a bad site, and made one that you can’t fit in. All the rules for pitching tents apply here! You want to sleep on smooth, dry ground.

Snow Shelters

These are a bit trickier, but are surprisingly warm inside. Building a shelter out of snow can be as simple as making an enormous pile of snow and then hollowing it out. Not all snow will work, as it must be reasonably compacted, but a snow shelter is a really excellent insulator. Other snow shelters that I’ve seen have involved digging a trench in the snow and then building a roof for the trench. This provides great protection from the wind as well, and you could build it pretty quickly if you needed to.

Elevated Shelters

In swamps and areas with awful bugs, it may be best to get a bit off of the ground. With your shoelaces or any cord you can find, you can usually string up cross members into a pair of trees to build a makeshift platform. Waste nothing, and remember that clothing can act as a fine makeshift rope. Try to pick a sheltered spot, and work with everything you have.

Final Tips

Human beings are amazing animals when it comes to adaptation. They have adapted to survive in nearly every environment, from rainforest to desert. Chances are, native peoples built shelters in places just like your location, and they had hundreds of years of practice. If you know how natives lived in your area, follow their designs. Otherwise, think on your feet and get building, since you will almost always require shelter when trying to survive.

Survival Skills: Balancing Risk vs. Rewards

Risk and rewards are a constant fact of life. In our every day, we balance the risks and rewards of daily tasks, and we gamble on little things. Wilderness Survival is no different, but compared to other “risky things” like penny stocks or speeding on the highway, the risks are much higher, and the reward might only be living to see tomorrow. When out in the woods, balancing these equations is never simple, and even an expert sometimes comes out on the bottom of what seemed like a good bet.

Keep a Positive Attitude

Staying positive in dire situations can be tough, but it is absolutely necessary. For example, you may find yourself in a situation where staying inside a cozy shelter as it is buried in snow will probably mean asphyxiation. Going outside to keep digging might help, but it is cold and awful. You probably wish you could stay put.

Let’s look at it one way. Staying inside your warm shelter gives you a 99% chance of death. Going outside and fighting for a safer shelter might give you a 90% chance of death. Not so great.
On the positive side, going outside to work on your shelter has ten times the survival rate. If you want to live, it is a no-brainer. The odds are against you, but you can at least get the best odds you can. If you focus on how unlikely your survival is, you will miss out on opportunities to increase your odds.

Mitigate Risks

As we saw above, you should mitigate risks. Suppose you come upon a pool of stagnant water. Drinking it is a risk. Can you mitigate it? Boiling it will probably help. Great! Now you are a bit closer to clean water. It might not be perfect, but it is a start.

Should you drink it though? Well, are you a little thirsty or massively dehydrated? Will this water be the difference between life or death? If so, drink it. If not, think about if another opportunity like this is likely. Maybe you should store the water and keep looking, only drinking it if you have no other choice. Think carefully about whether what you are doing is going to help.

Accept “The Best “Risks

Maybe crossing a river is the only way out for you. It is absolutely a risk, but if it is the “best risk” for getting out, then take it. Sometimes you will need to do things that you were told to “never ever do” in order to survive, but those “high risk” strategies are the only strategies that carry a chance of survival.
One example of this is the tourniquet. This old trick is almost never recommended anymore since it almost always results in the loss of a limb. A loop of rope is loosely fastened around the bleeding appendage and then tightened by twisting a stick into it. Tightened far enough, you will stop losing blood to that area. It is practically never recommended and only seldom taught because it carries such a massive cost. On the other hand, if you had (the classic example) a tree falls on your leg, and you have absolutely no method of getting help and you know that no help is coming since nobody knows where you are, then a tourniquet may be the best way to stop the bleeding so you can get out alive.

Don’t Get into Bad Situations

Overall, you should try to avoid risks in general. The most important step to take is to make sure that when you are in the wilderness, people know where you are going and when to expect you back out. Schedule a time and place to make contact as often as possible, so that people can immediately rescue you if you fail to make it to that place. Try to be as safe as possible, and remember that surviving is the most important part of a wilderness emergency.

Survival Skills: Crossing Water

It sometimes happens that a body of water is between you and where you want to be. Crossing water is often the most dangerous part of getting across a landscape. If you are stuck, you may have to get across, but knowing what to avoid is extremely important in these situations.

Still Water

Crossing a lake or still water is generally not that hard. In some cases, you may be able to simply wade across, but you should never assume that a lake is shallow enough to do so unless you have a very good reason to assume that. Something that is barely over your shoulders is more than enough to drown in if you panic or have an accident while crossing.

If you have the time or the inclination, it might be worth making a raft or other watercraft. Rafts are harder than they look, and it generally takes a much bigger raft than people would think to get them across, but if you have rope, rafts are easily lashed together from deadwood. Rafts are an excellent way to cross still water.

If you are crossing and your raft falls apart, don’t panic. The wood itself will still act as a floatation device. Grab the largest log you can and let it help you swim. Relax and take your time. Panic in the water is your enemy.

Moving Water

Moving water is not your friend in a crossing situation. While it makes better drinking water, it also makes a terrible crossing. Currents can be unpredictable and dangerous, and it is easy to underestimate currents when in shallow water. Remember that the river may be moving much faster at the center than the edges would have you believe.

Worse yet, fast currents can overwhelm you and pin you against invisible underwater debris. It is hard to drown in 3 feet of still water, but if the water is moving fast enough, 3 feet could easily be fatal. If you even suspect the water is moving “fairly fast” you may be better off looking for a way around.

If you can’t get across, look for the wide, deep parts where the water is moving slowly. While you may need to work harder to get across it, you risk less from the current. Finally, as a safety margin, always assume the current is much faster than it appears.

Rafts may get you across a river as well, but generally, they are less sturdy than you want them to be and if the river is moving fast, they may break up beneath you. This is absolutely disastrous on a really fast river.

As before, don’t panic if you are in the water, but remember that if you are in the water with debris, a tossed raft, or a capsized canoe, you want to be on the upstream side of the floating object. This is because if you are downstream of the object, the object can pin you. Imagine an underwater rock comes up to about 8 inches of the surface. If you hit it and you are downstream, the canoe pushes on you and the rock pushes back, potentially crushing you or pinning you underwater.

Final Tips

If you don’t have to cross the river, don’t. Keep moving and looking for a more advantageous spot. Typically you can follow a river downstream and eventually find a road, bridge, town, or lake that will be a better option for your survival. Crossing flooded streams is obviously silly as well, and even mild streams can become deadly during spring floods in climates where snowmelt is a problem.
Keep dry if you can, and remember to carefully consider the risks before you ever try to cross a body of water.

Survival Skills: Improvising Camouflage

Camouflage predates all of the fancy fabrics and patterns we see today. Based on the idea of hiding oneself from danger, and hiding danger from your prey, this skill is as primitive as hunter-gatherer cultures and important enough to fuel a large hunting industry. If you are stuck in the wilderness, making your own camouflage can help you to hide effectively from whatever it is you want to hide from.

Blinds

To start with, you want to design one of two things. Decide if you want to make a blind or an outfit. A blind is a simple structure which hides you from view while providing adequate visibility for you. A blind takes a bit of time to set up, but once constructed, you can usually reuse it with little effort.

To make a blind, begin to make a small shelter out of sticks and bramble. Use materials that you find laying around. Sometimes it helps to make a frame from larger timber or other supplies first, then to weave and pile sticks, grasses, and other woodland debris around it. Ideally, the blind should cover you almost entirely or entirely. It should have ports for you to see from, but depending on what you are hiding from, those may not be necessary. If you plan to hunt from the blind, be sure that the ports look out onto the area you intend to be hunting.

From a distance, the blind should be more or less indistinguishable from the surrounding area. It should blend in well, so avoid all of the hallmarks of a human building. That is to say, organized shapes and right angles are to be avoided. It should look chaotic, not organized. Chaos is the more natural appearance in most areas.

Camouflage Outfits

To make a camouflage outfit, think about how the area you will be in looks. In general, the first thing you want to do is break up your silhouette. This means that you want to get rid of your “human” shape and look more like a bush or a tree. For instance, weaving sticks and grasses into your hat will remove some of your shapes. Sitting down will help as well. Sitting down against something large will help the most.
Think about making yourself the same color as your surroundings. Using local natural materials, pin, tie, weave or somehow add them to your clothing. This is the same principle as the ghillie suit used in the military. While they are bulky, they will make you look like a pile of debris instead of a human. Done expertly, you can even move around, adding to the suit as you do, without being detected.

Final Tips

Always think of yourself as a human trying to act like a bush or tree. Make yourself look like a tree or bush using anything you can, from dust for color to sticks for outline, and you will be just fine. Also remember that nothing is more telling than motion, so if you need to hide, be still. Moving is difficult even for experts, and it takes practice to be able to move in such a way as to not give yourself away.

Survival Skills: Make Your Own Rope

If you are at all like me, the first things you look for in any outdoor situation are ropes and knives. To the skilled mind and hands, rope an knives represent the pinnacle of human achievements, and most other things can be engineered with just those items and a little bit of timber. From bridges for travel to snares for Food, rope (and the knives you cut it with) can be the difference between life and death in a survival situation. Of course, if you don’t have it, what do you do?

Spinning Method

Spinning is the ability to turn fibers into rope. Natural ropes (as opposed to synthetic ropes or metal cables) are made by taking long fibers and twisting them into one another. With materials like wool, which are already somewhat knotted together, spin easily and naturally with spinning wheels or you can draw them out (slowly) with your hand and twist as you go. That twisting tightens up the already existing tangles into a thread. Try it with a big ball of cotton or with a bag of polyfill (pillow stuffing). Tease out a bit and twist as you tease. The material will wind into a thread as you tighten it further. Depending on your purposes, a thread or a string of yarn may be ideal.

Braiding Method

If your fibers are really long, you can also make a string by braiding. Weaving takes far longer, but for really long fibers, it can be a superior string. To practice this trick, you can take a few long palm fronds and pull them into individual fibers. The fibers should be pretty long, and if they are bigger than 18 inches, you can try to weave them together. This is long work, but it is simple and takes little energy. Experiment with how tight you want to make the braids. If you make it too tight, the rope might be stiff, and too lose might make it lose its strength. try to stagger the fibers so that you are always weaving a new one in and an old one out. For this reason, I like to braid with five fibers, with two being in transition at any one time.

Once you have the assembled a string, you make a stronger rope from that string by again, twisting or braiding multiple strings together. As the rope thickens, it pays to have a more even twist if you are twisting it together. You can practice this skill with yarn. Yarn is typically weak enough to break with just one person’s force pulling on it, but if you twist three cords of yarn into a single yarn rope, it is much stronger. Twist three of them together and it is quite sturdy, even with weak starting rope.

Getting the Fibers

Knowing where to get fibers can be tough. Linden trees are known for having pliable fibers just beneath the bark. Soaking these for a day in water yields great fibers. Hemp and jute are other famous fibers for just this purpose. Thin strips of leather have been used in historic times for this purpose, and long animal hairs will work in a pinch. High on the gross factor, animal sinew is an effective string as well. For the most part, though, you will probably use trial and error. Find a sapling, strip the bark, and see if you can pull fibers off of it. A surprising number of trees and plants will work, including bamboo.

Survival Skills: Acorn Whistles

If you want to be found, creating a shrill, piercing, and unmistakably human noise is a great start. Whistles are a common piece of kit for campers because of their signaling capacities, but if you don’t have a whistle, it isn’t hard to make one if you know what to look for.

Improvising a Whistle

A whistle is typically composed of a sharp lip (to cut your air and create the vibration) and a small resonator chamber. While you probably can’t machine plastic while lost in the woods, an acorn cap will do nicely for both tasks. This trick was once common knowledge amongst boys who played outdoors, but alas, video games and the internet have reduced our outdoors skills.

If you don’t have an acorn cap, you can use a hollowed out acorn, or even a soda bottle cap. Anything with that tiny cup shape will work, though it may not be as piercing.

Making the Whistle Sound

Once you have your “whistle,” you need to hold it very carefully. Start by curling the non-thumb fingers of both hands, and bring the sides of your thumbs together. Grasp the acorn cap in both hands between your thumbs and the sides of your pointer fingers. It should rest below your first knuckle on your thumbs.
Now, curl your thumb tips outward to reveal a wedge of the cap. It should be facing cup upwards, so you can see the edge. Rest your lower lip on your thumbs, just below where they make a ‘Y’ and then blow down the ‘Y’ and onto the lip of your acorn. It may take some experimentation with varying the angle and airspeed, but you will eventually hear a whistle.

Signaling Help

Emergency whistles, like signal fires, are in groups of three. Whistle three strong notes before resting to signal that you are in need of assistance. It can easily be heard well outside of visual distance, and it is unencumbered by fog or other distractions.

Emergency whistles aren’t expensive, and I recommend you carry one at all times when in the woods anyway. That said, it never hurts to know how to make a whistle out of natural materials in a pinch. Try this out ahead of time just to be prepared. I do it with soda bottle caps all of the time just to get people’s attention, and it keeps me in practice… just in case.

Survival Skills: Moving when Lost

In general, if you are lost in the wilderness, you should stay put. Someone should know where you are in general, and search parties will be on the way. Unfortunately, there may come a circumstance where moving is your only option, and if that happens, you should know how to move with maximum safety.

Getting More Lost

Especially in woodland environments, it is easy to go from “lost” to “very lost” and eventually, “un-findable.” What does that mean? Suppose you wandered off a path to track an animal and then found yourself disoriented and unable to get back to the path. Chances are, you aren’t too far away from the path already, and provided that you told Someone where you were going, searchers fanning out from that path will find you sooner. If you wander more, you may get out sooner, but you might also go in the wrong direction, making it harder for searchers to find you. The key thing in getting out when lost is that you make yourself findable.

In general, don’t move unless you have to. There are reasons you might have to such as no available water supply, a gravely injured companion, or, in the worst case, nobody knows where you are and how long you planned to be there.

Orient Yourself Easily

If you have a compass, it is your friend. Perhaps you know that the path you left is to the south of you. Let the compass guide you back by walking due south. One thing to remember with this strategy is to check the compass often. It is easy to get turned around outside, and then you will waste time and valuable energy walking in circles. A common strategy is to line the compass up with a landmark in your direction, walk to the landmark, and then take another reading and pick a new landmark. This is slow, but it tends to avoid beginner mistakes in orienteering.

Follow A Landmark

As you traverse terrain when lost, streams and paths can help you. If you reach a flowing stream, follow it downstream (unless you know there is something upstream). Typically, you will eventually come to a place where the stream crosses a real road. At least by following the stream, you will be headed in one direction the entire time. The same goes for lakes. Follow the lakeshore until you hit a stream.
With roads, some caution is recommended. In Canada, where I often go fishing, you could easily stumble upon a logging road and follow it for days without seeing anything. Worse yet, if you are headed up the road toward a disused lumber site, you are likely to get to the end and then realize you have to turn around. Use your knowledge of the area to decide if following the road is a good idea. In most of the United States, this isn’t a big problem and most roads will lead you to something you can use (like a shelter) or some civilization.

Things Not to Do

It is a bad idea to use the sun or a large landmark in the distance as a navigation aid. If you are walking straight toward the landmark, that may be okay, but if you try to keep it to one side of you, you will walk in a giant circle. Similarly, the sun is a moving target, and people following the sun easily get lost. If the sun is your only navigational aid, then you probably should remain still and wait for rescue.

Final Tips

Use everything you know about an area to get out alive. A compass in your pocket might save your life as well, so don’t neglect the low-tech standby of generations of outdoorsmen. Finally, and above all else, make sure someone knows where you are and how long you are supposed to be there so that they can recognize that you are lost immediately. This simple advice is the most important thing you can do when headed out into the woods.

Survival Skills: Netting Fish

Freshwater is one of your friends when surviving in the wilderness. It is a source of water, bathing, recreation, and almost all of your needs. In addition, it is probably a decent source of protein. While you probably won’t gain weight trying to net fish, netting fish is easier than building a spear and spearing them for most people, and a nibble of fish might be just the thing to keep your spirits up.

Survival Supplies

I’m assuming that you have little to no supplies. This means you don’t even have an emergency survival kit with a needle and thread. Assuming, however, that you are wearing a shirt, you have almost everything you need to start. Thread branches into the shirt, through the sleeves and out the bottom, and possibly between both sleeves, to make a cheap net.

Catch Something

Chances are, this net will only barely drain water, so you can’t net the big fish by dragging it over them. This net is for flipping out baitfish. Set the net in a shallow area, all the way on the bottom. Keep a hand on the net and stand very still. Eventually, the baitfish that you scared off when you waded into the water will emerge. They are usually quite tiny, at most 2 inches long, but they are relatively simple to pull up your net around.

Getting the speed right will take practice. Too fast will flip them out, and too slow will disturb them and they will swim off.

Ideally, you can net 5-6 of these little guys in an hour and set them aside. They are almost too small to cook, but they can usually be eaten raw or boiled whole. Remember, this is survival, not fine dining. They probably will be less energy than it takes to catch them, but the point is to get protein, not energy. If you need energy, work on nuts, acorns, or berries (provided you know that they are not poisonous and/or how to clear the toxins if they are).

Getting More

Practice will help a lot, but having a real emergency survival kit with fishing line and hooks will help more. If you had one of these, then you would have used those baitfish as bait, not food. Remember that worms and grubs can be decent food as well, so you may have to eat gross insects to stay alive. Staying alive is worth it though, and the gross things you ate will more than make up for their disgusting value in the stories you can tell in the future.

Survival Skills: Beat the Heat

Surviving in the warmer months can be really great, or it can be deadly. If you have a limited supply of water for drinking and cooling yourself, it is vital that you conserve your water and not waste it on the heat of the day.

Avoiding the Heat

If you are trying to survive, then there is always plenty of work to do. Be it repairing a shelter or finding food, you probably have better things to do then taking a nap. On the other hand, the rules change in hot climates. Once the weather is above 85 degrees Fahrenheit or so, you need to consider your water situation. If you have an abundance of fresh water, then do as you please as long as you don’t get too far from it. If you are traveling, never travel away from your fresh water if dehydration is a serious risk. You can dry out in only a few hours, so be prepared to sit out the heat of the day.

Heat can be avoided altogether by finding a shady spot and sticking to it. In the worst situations, you may be stuck beneath a tree for four or five hours awaiting cooler temperatures. take a nap or otherwise relax. You do yourself absolutely no favors if you use up your water due to impatience. Use the nap to stay up into the evening working, or wake up earlier and take advantage of pre-dawn light.

Moderating the Heat

If you must work in the heat of the day, there are steps you can take to moderate your temperature. The first is to simply be wet. If you are near a water supply (even if it isn’t drinkable), you can douse yourself and/or your clothing in water, repeating as needed. A swim usually will keep you cool for up to a half an hour due to evaporative heat losses. Humid days seem to lessen the effect.

Another tactic is taken from native peoples around the world. Wear bigger clothing. Lightweight, open fabrics that don’t sit heavily upon you are surprisingly cooling. As long as the wind can get through, they provide a shade for your body. While you probably won’t be making your textiles when lost in the wilderness, it is something to consider when heading out into the wilds to begin with.

Hats are also a lifesaver. Something with a brim large enough to shade your eyes and the back of your neck will really reduce your internal temperature and make the midday sunless oppressive.

Final Tips

Heat is a fact of life. We survived millennia without air conditioning and climate control, and you can make it through the hottest of days as long as you take it easy. If you have abundant water, the heat might only slow you down, but if water isn’t plentiful, consider your options and take the safest route when dealing with the midday sun.

Survival Skills: Lashing

While it may not be the first thing you think of when you imagine wilderness survival, you are probably more dependent than you think on constructed objects. From shelter frames and bridges to simple rafts, your ability to thrive in the wilderness is dependent upon your ability to build things. Now, assuming you didn’t go out into the wilds with a bag of nails and a hammer, how are you going to accomplish all of the construction that you will need to? For generations, people have relied on lashing to build the necessities of life. Lashing is simple, elegant, and not hard once you have gotten some decent string or rope.

Getting Rope

If you have string(or something made of sturdy fabric that you are willing to sacrifice), you are all set. You can braid it to make it stronger if your original cord isn’t strong enough on its own. Unfortunately, you might not have the cord you need when you get out into the woods.

There are a few solutions to this problem. The first is to sacrifice clothing. Carefully cut your clothing into long strips, and braid them into each other for strength. Tying them together will work in a pinch, but all of those knots will make working with it hard. I’ve found it best to just braid a few strips at long staggered intervals and to braid a new one in as an old one is reaching its end. As long as your fabric isn’t really slippery or stretchy, the braid will bind everything together well enough.

Another option is to harvest natural fibers. Long strands of plant fibers from trees will generally work as long as they can be bent and braided without breaking. You can always twist a few together at first to make the cord you intend to braid with. This is a time-consuming process though, but it can be a good way to kill time if you have a surplus of it and want to keep your mind on progress.

Wrapping and Frapping

Lashing itself is a process of wrapping and then tightening those wraps. Lashings exist for almost any intersection of poles (or in your case, trees or branches) that you can imagine. Western lashings start by tying a hitch (such as a clove hitch) around your first stick and then wrapping the sticks as tightly as you can in specific patterns, depending on the joint required.

Once the wrapping is done, the frapping begins. Frapping is done by tightly wrapping the rope between the joints. This compounds the pressure and secures the lashing. This must be extremely tight to secure the entire object.

Finishing Up

If this process sounds complex, relax. It is much easier with illustrations. If you want a field guide, the most compact reference I can recommend is the Pioneering Merit Badge from the Boy Scouts of America. It has illustrations of common lashings, methods of making rope, and basic knot knowledge.
If you are ready to start lashing, try it out at home. You would be surprised some of the useful things you can make. I’ve seen entire beds made from lashed-together small tree trunks, and it was both artistic and awesome. If it matched my decor, I might do the same.

Regardless, this is a good skill to have. It teaches you to look at objects in terms of basic engineering instead of in terms of lumber and firewood. I highly recommend you try lashing out.

Survival Skills: Finding Protein

The importance of protein in the modern diet is quite a controversial issue. There are low-carb-dieters and bodybuilders who believe it is everything and vegans proving that it really isn’t so hard to come by, but when wilderness survival is the goal, having a source of protein, even occasionally, is of extreme importance. From preserving muscle mass to regenerating damaged tissues, it is indisputable that your body needs protein to survive, and it is well accepted that animal protein is the source that we are best adapted to handle. Getting your hands on that protein when you can’t hit the grocery store aisles is another matter.

Get Creative with What You Consider “Food”

When trying to survive, you should probably get over all of your food phobias. Be it bugs, pigeons, fish, or snakes, if it is edible, you will probably have to knuckle under and eat it. Be ready to eat parts of animals that aren’t meat, and be ready to like it.

The only exception I would make is for something that I knew I had an allergy to, or any food that I knew was highly toxic in my area. Examples of this could be filter-feeding or scavenging shellfish downriver from industrial sites. I would need to be on the verge of absolute starvation before I considered eating the crabs from New Jersey’s Arthur Kill, since decades of industrial work have made them all but a guarantee of cancer. That said, if I were left with no choice at all, I would even eat them, because cancer can be treated later, while starvation has to be treated now.

Tap into your Skills and Materials

Catching animals to eat isn’t always easy. Most things don’t want to be eaten. Digging for insects is usually fairly simple in many areas, but it is a lot of work for only small payoffs. Remember, you will often burn more energy than you get out of the food, so protein specifically should be a secondary concern to having a generally available food source like acorns (once leeched of tannins) or berries.

On the other hand, setting traps and snares for rabbits and small game is often simple enough, takes minor effort, and while the payoff is sporadic, a squirrel or rabbit constitutes a feast in the wild. Rabbits are practically made for snaring. A good example of a snare can be found at this website. Figure 4 traps, also listed on that website, are a versatile small game trap that will often win you a meal. remember that you are playing the odds, so you should set up as many traps in multiple places as you can. Some will get sprung with nothing, but eventually, one will give you a nice, protein-rich meal.

Remember that fish are great too. fish can be netted, caught traditionally on lines, or even trapped if you are really creative. Just about anything is worth a try at eating if you are desperate enough. Just remember to avoid brightly colored insects, caterpillars (unless you can identify them expertly enough to know that they are safe), and the livers of arctic animals (which for reasons of survival are so extremely rich in vitamins that they flood your body, giving you hypervitaminosis).

Final Tips

Remember that all of your “city ideas” have to go out the window in a survival situation. In general, I would never want to eat kidneys but put me in the forest for four days with no meat, and you can be absolutely sure I’ll eat kidneys. Meat, be it muscle or organ, can’t be wasted. If you aren’t sure if something is edible, eat only extremely tiny amounts of it until you can document no reaction. Also, remember to cook everything to “well done” status to avoid potentially dangerous parasites.

The last note I will leave you with is on risk balancing. Remember that you are always risk balancing against the odds in the wilderness. Survival is a matter of playing the safest bets you can. If you have to choose between long-term and short-term consequences, take the long-term consequence, since that requires you to live long enough to experience that problem.

Survival Skills: Testing Foods for Poisons

If you are stranded in the wilderness, you have to eat. Of course, knowing what to eat is tough. Sometimes, you have to take the plunge and eat something that may or may not kill you. Knowing when to do this is important, as is knowing how to do it. This can be a scary thought, but learning how to eat potentially poisonous things might save your life someday.

When to Eat an Unknown

Eating anything that didn’t come from a supermarket is risky, but many things like apples and raspberries, are unmistakable. Other things, like mushrooms, can be a ticket to doom, even for people who know what they are doing. Eating an unknown, like all things in survival, is a balance of risk vs. reward.

To begin with, remember that you should never take an unnecessary risk. That means, if you aren’t stranded and dying, why would you eat an unsafe mushroom. If you are just curious, bag it and bring it with you out of the woods where you can identify it in a book. Don’t get killed because you were too impatient to look it up.

Second, remember that some things are riskier than others. Freshwater fish and mammals are generally safe when cooked, while insects are “usually safe” and mushrooms and berries are downright dangerous. Eat the least risky things you can.

Eating an Unknown

Before you consider eating an “unknown,” try a skin test. This is usually quite safe. Mash up a bit of it and hold it on your skin for 15 minutes or so. Then, wait for a few hours to see if there is a bad reaction. This will rule out anything with a topical poison. If you think poison ivy on your skin is bad, imagine how bad it would be in your mouth and throat.

Start on eating unknown foods carefully. To begin with, take a small sliver of your food and chew it. If it tastes okay, that is a good sign, but don’t swallow yet. Spit out the sliver and now wait, at least 8 but up to 24 hours, before trying any more. Some sources ask for less than an hour, but the longer you wait, the better. If your mouth goes numb or you get any other side effects, that is a good indication to stay away from that plant.

The next step is the small swallow test. In this step, you swallow a small mouthful of the substance. Again, wait for hours before continuing on. This could make you violently ill though, so be ready.
The last step is the meal step. You eat a small meal of the substance. If that goes down alright and you don’t have side effects for a day or two, you still might be eating a poison, but at least you know it isn’t an immediate killer. Humans have survived in many areas by eating weakly poisonous foods during famines and it is still common in developing countries.

Survival Tips to Remember

The steps above are no guarantee. At any step in the process above, a poison could have killed you. Only a few seeds from a yew (whose berries are actually edible if you remove the seeds) would kill you. Harmless looking Death Cap Mushrooms are almost always fatal. Just a few castor beans would poison you fatally. Essentially, you should remember that ingesting unknown food is inviting disaster, and you should only do so when you have no other choice. If your choice is between certain death by starvation and possible death by poison, choose the possibility of life, but if the choice is between sleeping hungry and eating an unknown mushroom, sleep hungry.

Survival Skills: How to Dry Food

Dehydration has been a time-honored tradition in food preservation. By and large, things that are dry are also nearly free from decomposition. Of course, when you have a food product in abundance, it is a race to preserve it before decomposition takes hold. A few traditional methods will generally do the trick for almost any circumstance.

Sun Drying

The sun is your friend in drying things. Solar drying has been used for everything from raisins to meat, so don’t convince yourself that it is too slow or impractical for any situation.

To sundry foods, you first need to make sure they are placed in a dry, sunny spot. Obviously, rain can be catastrophic in this process. Laying food onto stones in a sunny spot is typically sufficient. If it is a fruit, it will probably dry faster if it is mashed and laid in a thin layer, drying into fruit leather. If it is a meat product, then it may be better to hang it in the sun over a branch, since this will let the air get under it and across it. With meats especially, you want it to be a dry day, as humidity slows the drying process.

Smoke Drying

Smoking is another method of reducing moisture. Also, the smoke imparts flavor and preserves the foods. This is typically a meat process, and it is the preferred method for preserving fish if you can’t salt them. The dryer you get it, the longer it will last, but you can go overboard and turn your meat into rocks as well. If you do this, grind it between two stones and you can eat the chew that is left over. Meat chew is an acquired taste, but it beats wasting the meat.

To smoke your meat, you can construct a hut from natural materials that takes a small, smoldering fire and holds the smoke in the room. Alternately, you can hold your meat quite high above a small cooking fire until it is dry. The first method is more difficult but easier to control.

Final Notes

Food is typically hard to come by in a survival situation. Many native peoples had boom and bust cycles and had to learn to preserve food from the booms in preparation for the busts. Never waste an opportunity to gather copious amounts of food, but as you do, keep in mind the need to preserve it and be ready to work to keep your food for longer than a few weeks.

Survival Skills: Avoid Rabbit Starvation

Rabbits are an amazing prey animal when trying to live in the wilderness. They breed extremely quickly, fall prey to traps easily, and make a pretty great meal once caught. Catching them with snares and traps is generally pretty simple if you know where the rabbits are in the area, and you can harvest them aggressively throughout the year. Their abundance, however, does not make them the perfect survival meal!

Rabbit Starvation

Survivalists are keen to note that protein is of utmost importance and that having an occasional source of protein in your diet prevents significant malnutrition and loss of strength. Of all the macronutrients, protein is the one that your body will use for energy and to rebuild itself physically, making it required nutrition.

Rabbit meat is nearly pure protein, making it seem ideal. What is unrecognized though is that the meat has almost no fat content. The lack of fat content means that people who attempt to subsist on rabbits will often find themselves in a situation of rabbit starvation.

Rabbit starvation is code for acute protein poisoning. Your body, in absence of vitamins, minerals, and other energy sources, will begin to have trouble running on pure protein. Without fat to help absorb minerals and without carbohydrates for energy, the rabbit will provide too little nutrition to your body and you will begin to need other food sources.

Rabbit Starvation Symptoms

Rabbit starvation symptoms set in when under significant stress from survival already, and can be deadly if you can’t adjust or be rescued in time. First, a feeling of insatiable hunger sets in. This is your body craving non-protein and attempting to tell you as much. Diarrhea, fatigue, and headache are also common problems. Eventually, it could kill you.

Avoiding Rabbit Starvation

Fortunately, rabbit starvation is an extreme problem brought on by extreme conditions. All it takes to avoid it is a diverse diet. In warmer months, diversity of diet is quite easy, and this is almost unheard of. In winter, or in extreme climates, survival on rabbits can be a serious problem though.

Some experts recommend that if you are given no other option, broaden your definition of food. Eat everything on the rabbit (except for the fur). Brains, eyes, liver, and yes, the intestines, are all sources of important nutrition that you may miss out on if you don’t eat them. For instance, brains and bone marrow contain significant amounts of fat.

As always, incorporating amounts of vegetables is incredibly important as well. Getting vitamins from animal organs is sub-optimal in many cases, and relying upon it is a shaky way to survive. Knowing local edible plants will go a long way in helping you fight off malnutrition as well.

Final Tips

Don’t turn your nose up at food where you can get it. Animals, rabbits included, are still extremely important when trying to survive. The main lesson is to never rely solely on a single food source. Rabbits highlight the problems with reliance upon single sources of food in a dramatic fashion. Also, remember that you still need protein, fat, and carbohydrates to survive in the long run. Some may be more easily available on a seasonal basis, but you must do what you have to in order to obtain all three.

My father tells a story about hunting caribou with Inuit peoples in Canada. When they felled a caribou, they promptly cut the fat from its back, treating it as a valuable commodity. They then sliced the liver (still raw) and used it to shovel the insides of the last stomach pouches into their mouths. They explained that vegetation was rare in the area, and that the lichens the deer ate would be digested far enough for humans to eat in the last stomach compartments. Thus, this meal of fat, liver, and pre-digested lichen was a powerful survival meal for them. It is that kind of thinking that allows them to survive in the wilderness, and that is what you must emulate to survive as well.

Survival Skills: Avoiding Wound Infections

Survival is about keeping the odds in your favor, or as close to in your favor as you can. many things which are “no big deal” within the limits of a society become life-threatening in a survival situation. For instance, a simple wound infection can turn deadly quite quickly without access to antibiotics. Gangrene, wound botulism, and other infections are all quite deadly, and without modern hygiene, they aren’t as uncommon as you would think.

Avoid Getting Wounded

his should go without saying. Don’t get hurt, and avoid it as hard as you possibly can. Being hurt, even in a minor way, dramatically hurts your odds of survival. A paper-cut could be the infection that kills you, so where possible, avoid taking risks where being hurt is a concern.

Of course, that is impossible for a human being. You are going to cut yourself, tear your skin, and be generally exposed to pathogens, so don’t be paranoid. What I’m trying to get across is that you should not be careless. For instance, pay attention to the spiny fins on fish. These are typically a short route to an infected puncture wound if you get caught with one, and by being mindful, they are typically easy to avoid.

Keep Wounds Maintained

When you do get hurt, and you will probably get hurt, keep your wounds clean and dry. Wash them in the cleanest water you can and remove any foreign debris. Let wounds clot and don’t pick at the clot once it is formed. If you have it available, put a clean, dry compress on the wound after washing it. Change the compress every 24 hours.

Don’t let wounds sit in moisture. It may mean taking off your shoes every 2 hours to dry your feet or taking frequent breaks to let the sweat dry from your groin, but if you let it remain wet and humid, you create ideal conditions for infection.

Environment plays a huge role in this as well. Humid, moist areas are notorious for breeding infections. Swampy water is filled with bacteria, and if you are never dry, it can live on your skin and in your wounds. This is a ticket for disaster.

If you have the luxury of waiting and resting, do so. Give yourself time and remember that you need to heal before you can be back to full st