River Foraging -Finding Food at the Water-

hey guys today we're down here at the river in order to show you some basic forging now there's gonna be techniques and some food sources that don't require tools to get your hands on well as long as you know what to look for and kind of have an idea of what techniques to use you gotta be doing just fine so the first technique is dealing with crawdads often called crawfish have you seen some of my videos before you know that I trap quite a few of these in my creeks today we're going without the trap and we are instead in the river this is the San Antonio River we're going after the Texas devil crawfish oftentimes I'm trapping the red swamp crawfish so different kind of crawfish different setting different technique now first and foremost you need to actually go and locate a crawfish mound so take a look here you might have seen these down here in the south around stock ponds creeks riverbeds anywhere there's a little bit of mud your crawdads crawfish are going to dig down especially when the water starts to recede and they're gonna tunnel down down down straight down to the earth until they gets that water line now as they're tunneling they build these chimneys and they go down and pull up more and more mud they clump it over and this thing will continue to get taller and taller from an inch high up to eight or nine inches different species different design different style but most of them are pretty easy to recognize the plan or rather the trick here is going to be digging down and not hitting any roots or any hard path as per technique hopefully we're fairly lucky now once you've located one of these mounds all you really have to do is start digging and using your hands hopefully you got some good clay and that there's not too many roots or rocks in the way now most years we're gonna have a pretty easy time at picking out mounds that are in some soft clay or not very many roots this year we don't have too many to choose from populations are always in flux but let's go ahead and let me show you what this is about the mounds should just come undone and apart and it works just like that all right it goes down from there you just kind of hope get it softened up and you start to dig all right check out what we've done I'm gonna have to go ahead and call this one though we've dug down we're hitting roots it's hard pack so crawfish one Bob zero again a lot of this comes down to location he is down there he's just too hard to get at it's one of the reasons why he's one of the holdouts he's surviving he dug it in the right place and more power to him he wins I'm gonna try this one more time or at least show you how far you need to dig into a mud wall in order to actually pull one of these guys out but yeah I want take a look at this crawfish mound that's a little bit smaller hole is about the same size I want to show you here so if you track down this Bank take a look this hole down here this is an access tunnel a lot of these will actually be it into and split off into other tunnels other crawfish dens will dig into them some of the side walls here are just littered with holes and so that's gonna make it a little harder to grab onto your crawfish crawdad depending on how many of these you have around but sometimes start digging here dig up a dig back and skip the mound itself when I have to admit defeat suffice to say the years that it's easy to dig these guys out and make a pretty good meal either over the fire a lot of people like to boil them or as bait crawfish mound is definitely something to look twice at well crawdads aren't happening this year but for every population that's a being hopefully you have one that is flowing and right here below me I'll be showing you a different food source this is gonna be clams mussels things that most people overlook or don't even know to look for that this is definitely the year of clams and mussels so what I'm gonna do is run my hands through the mud and set this up at all this is just amazing year I want to start pulling up different kinds clams and I usually have four different types of populations expressed in this area these are your washboard clams take a look I took me all of 10 15 20 seconds to pull in that much protein and that's as easy as it can be some years I'm just skimming my fingers through the mud and filling the top ridges of the clams here's another one and this is a different type you're putting this right back in just a moment but I pulled that out to tell you about it for a moment this is a threatened species right here so you want to know what you're looking for if you're out practicing survival skills you want to know what's protected and what's not so you're not pulling up things that are gonna get you in trouble or things that are going to impact a population so we're pushing that right back in there you need to do your homework when it comes to procuring your clams and mussels at your game warden if you need to but ignorance is not something that's gonna work if you're pulling it out and you're eating these things you're damaging the habitat you're gonna get in trouble so ask questions and know what you're doing now as I'm pulling these out it is easy it's just skimming my fingers through the mud so I'm taking my fingers through and I'm we're a 'king back most these are going to be pretty much aimed straight up just like this this my fingers are going to be simulating where the mud stops so this is the level of the ground and I'll just kind of feel the tops of these so you might imagine it's gonna be pretty sharp you don't have water shoes on and you're not careful you can go ahead and you can cut open your heels pretty easy especially with the number of clams I'm finding right now so you want to be very very careful different places with different amounts of sand or clay or roots you're going to find different types of clams as I get into kind of a gravel hard pack so more of those washboards I might be able to find what's called a golden orb which is also one you do not want to go ahead and collect once you get the feel down you'll know what not to pull up in the roots in the gravel I'll find what are called mini clams those don't usually get larger than a quarter found the one this is gonna be a really tiny one but I'm gonna go ahead and show it to you that is a mini clam and you've got to click to heckle a lot more of those but that's what you have that's what you have and they can get up to about the size of a quarter and you'll find quite a few of them once you find one you'll find more I've been asked just how far ranging do I have to go in order to find these guys this year all the way up to the bank so here we go all the way up next to the bank I'm finding them that's within five inches the water level back down in there and some years I can be Oh down to my ankles up up to mine up to my neck pulling these guys out so fairly deep past that you're not gonna find too many of them on the good years whenever you pull catfish in you'll find that their stomachs are gonna be full of those mini clams a lot of times and they're gonna be hunting for them so it's also a pretty good bait now to prepare these you can cut into them it's gonna be a fairly unsafe thing but if you have a fairly sharp knife very thin blade you can just kind of bisect and cut back and that'll release the muscles and will open up and you can get a hold of that meat either to use as bait to trap something else or to catch it fishing the easiest way to cook this is going to be just to put it next to the fire and once it gets hot enough it'll actually open up and you can get at that meat and stick it on a stick and I would do that to keep yourself from using that knife and potentially slicing your hands open because that's definitely definitely a danger other people will pull these up one way or another this is just really easy food even in the middle of winter I can go ahead and start my fire up on the bank I can come down here and pull out quite a few clams really fast and I can have food whenever I need it especially if I'm just really bad at fishing go ahead and put these things back but you'll never know unless you look also don't stop the first place you look go up and down the river some years it takes quite a bit of looking check the clay check the sand it just things that we ran in a year that just has a ton of them and that's luck so take care of your species these are filter feeders the more clams we have the better that means that we've got some healthy waters that's what we want so a good food and abundance that's what you want to find but if you don't know to look yeah it's dark so this drift of leaves and trash does not look like much on first inspection but if you pay close attention here this green ring this is actually called duck whedon you know anything about duck weed and you can positively identify it it's worth straining out it's worth cooking it's actually a superfood lots of protein lots of calories it comes down to it it's worth taking the time to actually strain this out and get enough of it to make a meal out of now if you also check take a look in between the parts and pieces some are quite small but there are little snails all throughout every once in a while like this and right here you find one that's almost bite-sized and it doesn't seem like much but if you're down to the point where you're straining out duck weed to survive you might as well throw in some escargot it's gonna be a little crunchy because he's not quite large enough to pull out just to get the beat out so cook him up chew the whole thing but beggars can't be choosers at this point food is food so back here behind me is an important feature this is where a creek is flowing out to join the main body of the river now whenever you find a landmark like this it's worth exploring further especially when you're surviving and foraging walking up a creek like this a lot of times you're gonna find secluded pools whenever the river comes up your big monster fish will travel up the creek and many times they'll get stranded whenever the water comes back down it's worth looking for also creek beds there transit areas you're gonna find lots of turtles moving back and forth whenever they're up on land or in shallow water they're easy to run up on they're easy to grab it's meat it's there it's worth taking a look I also find is a rule of thumb more chances more times than not I find lots and lots of nut and very trees on the insides of these creeks inlets so whenever the river comes up and floods that water is rising up and moving down the river can rise up to about 45-foot here so 45 foot above my head in a big flood but the idea is that since this Creek is going back at a diagonal this landmass right here that grows and grows protects this area over here from the main brunt of the flood so we have lots of wild pecan and mulberry back here that get all the benefit of the river water and Creek water but they don't get all the force and all the brutality of a flood so whenever you find a creek Inlet go ahead and explore further this tree I've got ahold of it's called a willow tree and there are several different types all of them very useful not so much for eating you're not really gonna get the nutritional value out of it but for making things if you've got the skill and you've got the time willows can be used to fashion baskets so if you can weave baskets you have a container also as it were you're gonna find your willows around streams rivers water courses they can be used to make fish traps and where you have a fish trap you already have your source fish so they come hand in hand if you have the skill if you have the time go ahead and use them not only that when most beautiful things will swim used for is pain reliever so if you give up there in the larger branches and you cut into that bark shoot some of that inner bark up you're gonna be just like taking some aspirin and that can be incredibly those is going to be the last place to show you for today and if I were in a survival situation I'd definitely be looking for a place that had features just like this namely the gravel and rock over here it's excellent building material not only that we have the river getting quite shallow for me I'm a trap builder so spending hours half day maybe more building all kinds of fish traps all throughout here the investment would definitely be worth it the long run and find yourself in a survival situation you might as well plan on being here for the long term and something that continues to catch and catch and catch without much effort that's where my money would be not only that but day and night being out here in the water maybe sharpening some sticks and being ready to spear something fish will move up and down throughout the river and you want to be ready I'm gonna be prepared at nighttime and we've done this a few times you can actually get out here and tickle the fish they can see during the day they're very skittish take away that light come up under the fish throw them up on bank it's worth a try so you definitely want to keep your options open now some of y'all might call me on this but I didn't middle in this river noodling is a possibility sticking your arm up under a bank hoping that something's gonna grab ahold of it like a big catfish that'll work in some water courses some waterways I've done it all up and down this place it doesn't happen the San Antonio River I've stuck my hand in all kinds of places that it shouldn't be and nothing's grabbed on that's far nothing's moved so you just kind of have to try things out see what works you never know where you're gonna find yourself the guys hopefully hopefully I've enjoyed this bye subscribe leave some comments and as always till next time that is a very tired and happy puppy quite fitting his name is actually huggable berry we're spending a day out in the water pretty apt [Applause] [Applause] you you

Channel: Bob Hansler

Views: 160,425

Rating: 4.8987985 out of 5

Keywords: Bob Hansler, Survivalist, Bushcraft, Outdoorsman, Survival Skills, Wilderness Survival, Primitive Foraging, Foraging, Foraging Edibles, River Foraging, Primitive Survival, Survival Food, Survival Foraging, Texas Foraging, TEOTWAWKI, SHTF, Fish Trap, Clams, Crawdads, Duckweed, Crayfish, Crawfish, River Survival, Wild Foods, Primitive Food Gathering, Prepper

Id: QBiUQflQT94

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 29 2017