WHEN
YOU DO BUSHCRAFT, one of the skills that you would need to use and practice is
hunting. There are many ways how to
supply yourself food or furs from wild animals but trapping is the most
efficient and is the easiest. All you
have to do is carry a survival knife and, perhaps, some cords or wires,
although when you are proficient you could manufacture cords from nature.
Compared
to hunting an animal with a rifle, trapping ensures that you have enough meat
to eat where a bullet hole will, otherwise, waste some of it away and it also
ensures you the best part of a fur caught unscathed where a weapon would,
altogether, damage it. Besides that, a
rifle sound will scare away game and would give away your presence.
Catching
prey with traps and snares does away of staying inert in a place for a long
time so you could get your chance. You
just set up a good number of these and leave and then return the next day. But setting up traps and snares are not done
randomly. It is like playing chess. You have to lure prey where they are most
likely populate or where they most likely pass by.
Traps
are simple contraptions that take form borne out from natural terrain or done
by taking advantage of the habits and instincts of wild creatures. The single most important element here is
luring. You must lure your prey to get into
your trap and it must appear convincing else it is just another form of “civil
works” gone to waste.
Food
and water are the most important reasons why creatures are likely to be lured
into and they have their own ways of getting these and, in the process, they
leave traces of their presence. Another
strong impulse to lure your prey out of their comfort zones is thru
mating. Otherwise, if your prey are not
into these conditions you lure them to flight into a predetermined location.
Trapping
devices could stand on its own but they work better with snares. Snares are more complex and these
contraptions use a mechanism that is initiated by the prey. It has a trigger system that employ a spring
mechanism that is drawn taut to achieve effect when released. A loop made from either a cord or a thin wire
and bait are attached to the trigger and completes this simple, but made from
nature, machine.
This
blogger teaches people about bushcraft and survival through his Grassroots
Bushcraft Teaching Series for members of the Camp Red Bushcraft and
Survival Guild and other interested individuals. Ten people availed of this free event on
March 10, 2013. This outdoors lecture is
taught at the Babag Mountain Range and, this time, this blogger will talk about
how to identify a trap zone on rivers, how to employ traps and how to make a
simple snare.
As
always, the journey to the range start from the grounds of the Our Lady of
Guadalupe Parish. Tailing behind this
blogger are Jhurds Neo, Silver Cueva, Dominikus Sepe, Ernie Salomon, Nyor Pino,
Benjie Echavez, Kulas Damaso, Antonette Bautista and Patrick Calzada. From Napo, we follow the route towards Lower
Kahugan Spring and rest for a while and replenish water bottles.
Along
the way, I show the participants of the possible areas of the creek where traps
could be constructed and used. Catching
fish by trapping is very easy and river creatures are most easy to lure even
when you do not place bait. As I have
said before, traps make good use of the natural elements where, on a river, the
flow of current will lure the fish there to look for food.
A
classic example of a river trap is to make use of a row of boulders and divert
some water from the main current into a deep cul-de-sac or dead end. Such trap is very efficient and would be
converted as a cage once a number of fish are trapped and it would be your
source of food. To sustain your
existence in a survival situation, twenty or more of these placed along the
length of a creek is adequate.
Where
streams are narrow and natural traps are scarce, a piece of bamboo pole three
feet long is enough. One end is opened
and the other end closed but a small hole is bored through it so water current
would flow through the bamboo and remove buoyancy. You place a weight at the closed end and some
bait and it becomes a hidden sanctuary of a river creature. Twenty or more of these placed along the
length of the stream would ensure you food a day provided it is not washed by a
rain-fed current.
After
a half-hour of lecture, we proceed on to higher ground. We reach the Roble homestead at 10:45 AM and prepare
our noontime meal. Food are taro sprouts
mixed with red beans, sliced eggplants and gumbos and fried in oil; milled
corn; rice; pork adobao; and canned tuna.
Fele Roble provided us green coconuts for dessert.
After
the meal, the lecture proceed on to making a basic snare. The mango tree and, later, a Mexican lilac
branch, provided the spring device. The
trigger device is made from a guava branch while the cords are discarded shoe
laces. A dead branch half-buried on the
ground is used as the “Guinea pig” which was caught when the trigger is
released.
Equipped
with the knowledge of this very basic mechanism, all one have to do is
improvise and include other devices and components or extend its reach. The bigger your prey, the thicker your spring
device will be. For the lack of a spring
device, you may substitute it with a deadfall.
The weight of a stone or a tree trunk strung up high is sufficient to
that task.
Lastly,
I advise all to never leave a man smell on all their undertakings. Cover and camouflage all surfaces touched by
hands and remove all human refuse indicating your presence. The activity end at 3:30 PM and we retrace
our route back to Napo and then Guadalupe.
We proceed to the Red Hours Convenience Store for our traditional post-activity
discussions and socials.
Document done in LibreOffice
3.3 Writer
