What I love about Bushcraft is the wide variety of knowledge and skills associated with it. There’s fire-lighting, cooking, shelter-building, tool-making, tool-using, traditional crafts, carving, aspects of survival skills and hunting/trapping to name just a few.

My particular interests at the moment are archery, tracking and observing wildlife, which for some reason I tend to keep separate from main-stream bushcraft skills. But there are other subjects on the periphery of Bushcraft which I also take an interest in.

Aspects like the weather fascinate me. My excursion posts usually start off with a record of what the weather was like and I try to interpret the weather maps and synoptic charts as best I can. I’m certainly no expert, but skills such as reading weather signs in the field can be handy on excursions as well as creating another interesting facet for study of the natural world.

Astronomy is another interesting subject which could be classed as relating to Bushcraft especially in a navigational sense at night. I’m not particularly good at identifying constellations or individual stars yet, but with the help of Stellarium (free) software, I think I’m improving.

Talking of navigation, this is another area of interest. American Bushman published a link to a site recently LandNavigation.org which offers great information on map reading and compass skills. I really don’t have occasion to use this skill too much, but I do like looking at and interpreting maps. Somehow I find them fascinating. I try to make my own sketch maps that really don’t make any sense to anyone except me! But it’s good fun doing it.

Horace Kephart enjoyed doing the same. He liked to study published maps but also made copious notes and maps of the areas he travelled. He created a key at the beginning of a notebook where each number represented where the specific map section was to be found. Like me, he used a quadrilled notebook and marked secret areas and hide outs which he marked on his maps calling them “masked camps.”

I love the phraseology he uses to describe one of these areas in “Camping and Woodcraft”:

“The camp is to be situated where not only men but cattle and wild hogs are unlikely to go. There should be nothing in the neigbourhood to attract to attract any of the various classes of people who frequent the woods. Study each of these classes of people in turn, and their habits.”

A man after my own heart.

Pablo