Woodlife Trails

After a week a very high winds, today was a bit calmer and in fact very sunny here in North Essex, but a little colder. Two projects today. One was to start testing my new camera. After a long time of putting up with one of first digital cameras to come out, I decided to upgrade. After a lot of research I decided to go for this Nikon Coolpix S4 camera. It has all the facilities of a reasonable standard SLR including good optical zoom (x10) and a macro facility whilst still being compact enough to put in a jacket pocket. A few other add-ons i.e. voice recording and movie capability give it the icing on the cake. The unique swivel lens is handy for framing awkward shots. The point and shoot mode is great for… er… pointing and shooting while there are several specialist modes like low light, landscape, high speed shutter, portrait etc etc. I must admit I wasn’t too creative today but just snapped away looking at the different settings. Yet another category appears on this blog! Photography.

My other mission was to try out fire-lighting in the very different conditions to last week. I wanted to see exactly just how much last weeks wet conditions affected normal fire-lighting. I used exactly the same wood for tinder and kindling as I did last week.

For a start it seemed to be easier just preparing the material in today’s conditions. I started with scraping birch bark and preparing some dry-ish wood into small feather sticks. After putting the kindling into a tent shape, I lit the tinder with the fire-steel and knife. Would you believe it, it caught on the second strike and I was able to feed it straight under the kindling where, again it caught well. Soon the fire, albeit a small one, was fully alight. All I had to do was add more moderately dry pieces of wood. What a difference a day or two of no rain makes. I was very surprised how quickly the wood had dried out. Well it was enough to make fire-lighting so much easier at any rate. Now all I have to do is keep practicing in the wet to become more adept at fire-lighting in any conditions.

I was still on the look out for the wood’s new residents; the deer. But I didn’t see them on this short excursion. I did however come across a bit of a gruesome discovery. I’ll post about this mid-week.

Thanks for the visit.