Making a Proper Fire Birdsnest

do you know how to make a proper bird's nest well today I'm gonna show you now when we talk about a bird's nest in the outdoor survival bushcraft communities what we're talking about is a small handheld fire lay okay it can be comprised of a multitude of different things typically most people gravitate towards using tree bark now not actual outside bark but there's different layers to bark so in this case we have tulip poplar bark that is down and off of the tree so it's not green we have the outer bark and then what we have here is the inner bark you can see that that peels away and that's what we're gonna use primarily for this bird's nest so I'm gonna walk you through how to actually create this because there is somewhat of an art to it and the better you get it doing this as you progress from char cloth to natural char to embers such as bow drill or hand roll embers you need to dial in and fine-tune this bird's nest and make sure it is more and more more complete in order to get that ultimate flame so let's take a look at how we actually do that so the bark itself okay outer bark we don't need but what's gonna happen a lot of times is there's no way to really get that off too easily so the easiest way to do this okay is to just start to process your material so break chunks and then you literally just have to work this in your hands now this stuff is pretty dry but that's okay as I work this and pull it apart what you're gonna see start to happen okay is that inner bark starts to separate from that outer bark so we can just discard just get rid of that outer bark cuz it's no good for us at all for this process okay so as we continue to get those fibers what we're gonna do is we're just gonna work a back and forth vigorously you really need to to get into it you got to muscle this stuff a little bit okay so you really want to work that you can see I'm working it back and forth I'm moving along as I'm doing that what's happening is I'm breaking those fibers down I'm exposing more and more fine fibers okay so we will continue that process all along so I can get some more bark here and just continue to work that all right now I always tell individuals when you do this you can see that we're getting some dirt a lot of this is just it looks like dirt but it's just the outer bark breaking away and then we're also getting some fine material which I just grabbed here okay that's falling off of that bark and that's important to save that so if you didn't have the table which you're not going to a haversack works really good you can open up something like this and what you can do then is you can start the process over this haversack your materials you can see what I have in my hand here is a mixture of what we would say is probably medium sized material and then what we would also classify as large material so think of a fire lane general we start with small stuff but where's our small stuff well that's what we catch on here okay so of course the other is going to be a couple big ones mixed in but if you look what's on my haversack other than that dirt type stuff okay from the outer bark there's a lot and nice little fine hairlike pieces of that inner bark okay now it's okay if it's mixed in with some of the bigger stuff it's not a problem at all okay but you want to gather up a vast majority of that so then what that's going to do is that's going to give us our small material so what were you created with just one single piece of bark then is we have our small our medium and our large material so now let's work with those materials backwards in our fire order so normally when we build our campfire we get that flame going and we put the small medium large what we're gonna do with the bird's nest though is we're gonna start with that larger stuff now you need a lot of large stuff because once this gets burning this is what is going to prolong the burn of the bird's nest itself so think of it again we're gonna start this is gonna be the small side up the large we start that real little ember and we need to Shepherd that into something bigger and as that burns and grows we need our fuel alright our big stuff burning long because then once this is burning our small sticks are gonna go on top of this for our fire light okay so I'm gonna first take this and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start to form this into a bird's nest type shape now what is super important with this that so many people do is they make a bird's nest and when they do that they make it really look like a bird's nest it looks like just like that you can see there's that little area the bird would sit or maybe its eggs would bein the problem with this is if you lay an ember or char in here okay there's not a lot of room from my finger here to this finger okay because we have that dip so there's a lot of material on the outside edge of this and if you actually look through here you can see my eye hopefully there's not much material okay and as that ember burns it's gonna burn down into our bird's nest so it's very important when we make a bird's nest that we make it more like a soup can and less like a bird's nest okay so maybe we can rename that or something I don't know but I like to tell people you want to make it nice and thick and not big like a pancake okay so it's okay to have that little bit of a divot in because we're gonna fill that in in a second but we want to make sure it's thick so if you put your index finger here and your index finger here you should have a good amount of material in between now once we have that situated okay the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna grab our medium material our medium material now is going to go into that little pocket we created again we don't want to spread it out we want it nice and condensed so I actually like to take that and I'm gonna tighten that down okay and I'm gonna place that inside alright so what that now has done is increase the density of the center of that bird's nest super important because again as that ember burns in it's going to be burning in this section so we do want some density again think if you have a flame and I just throw a really light pile sticks all over it not everything's getting heated if them sticks are together and compact and laid on the flame there's more area and surface area there for it to burn so that is important our last step then is we're going to take our superfine material we gathered off the table in the haversack we're gonna place that right on top again we need some density to that and we're gonna press that all in okay now at this point I still have a little bit of a divot that's going to accept our ember or our charred material we have a lot of thickness from front to back we go from very fine material to very thick material and then you have yourselves a very effective well-built bird's nest for fire and that is how you properly build yourself a proper bird's nest when out in the field and you do need to put that thought process behind a lot of people just want to grab material and go with it really quickly but when it comes to fire and it comes to preparation for fire that preparation phase is gonna take the longest but that's what sets us up for success so it's very important that we get that right now this was bark as I said earlier in a video but if you were using grass or other types of Barker mixture bark and grasses it's the same concept that's gonna apply you're building a small fire lay the tan held and if you think of it always like that it's gonna help you along throughout that creation process so if you have grass and you have bark you just got to dissect it and figure out what material is gonna be finest all the way out the thickest and then condense it that it works in that soup can type fashion rather than that that big open area it's gonna be very very important and you're gonna get it and it's going to be more dialed in for you and it's gonna make life that much easier so I hope you enjoyed this video this is something I see it classes all the time to people they struggle with until they get it and once you got this skill down you got it checkmark and you're on your way the bigger better things in the bushcraft the world so I hope you enjoyed this as always check us out a coal cracker bushcraft calm and until the next video stay in the woods

Channel: Coalcracker Bushcraft

Views: 43,517

Rating: 4.986207 out of 5

Keywords: Coalcracker Bushcraft, Dan Wowak, Appalachian Bushman School, Camping, Hiking, Survival, Bushcraft, Survival Skills, Bushcraft Skills, outdoorlifestyle, survivalinstructor

Id: TwmtXaDri74

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020