An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

Spotting large predators in the wild is a thrill for any hiker or outdoorsmen, but coming face-to-face with a 220-pound cat can turn a walk in the woods into a fight for your life. Also known as cougars in some parts of the country, mountain lions tend to attack when cornered, or when they believe you might be a reasonable piece of prey. The key to avoiding a deadly encounter on the trail starts with a calm reaction.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

The post Skill of the Week: Survive a Mountain Lion Encounter appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

When people think about survival and preparedness, they tend to think of dealing with an end-of-the-world kind of scenario. But lots of bad things can happen, and are more likely to happen, that fall short of the apocalypse. My guest can help you prepare for any worst case scenario, whether it’s the worst thing to happen to mankind or just the worst thing to happen to you this year. His name is Mike Glover, and he’s a former Green Beret, the founder of Fieldcraft Survival, and the author of Prepared.

Today on the show, Mike and I first talk about the softer skills of preparedness. We discuss how to create plans using military concepts like war gaming and the PACE methodology, build your tolerance to stress, and develop your situational awareness so you don’t freeze in a crisis or let one catch you by surprise. In the second half of our conversation, we discuss the harder skills of preparing for worst case scenarios. Mike outlines what capabilities every man should develop. He shares his own EDC and what he recommends you carry and wear on a day-to-day basis. We talk about how to stock your home and car for emergencies and more.

Related Resources From AoM’s Extensive Survival and Preparedness Archives

• Podcast #820: Escape the Safety Trap
• How to Make a Bug Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Emergency Evacuation Survival Kit
• How to Bug-In: What You Need to Know to Survive a Grid-Down Disaster
• What Every Man Should Keep in His Car
• A Beginner’s Guide to EDC
• How to Use a Tourniquet to Control Major Bleeding
• A Complete Guide to Home Fire Prevention and Safety
• How to Develop Situational Awareness
• The Complete Guide to Making a DIY First Aid Kit
• Podcast #610: Who Lives in Survival Situations, Who Dies, and Why
• A Complete Guide to Home Security

Connect With Mike Glover

• Mike on IG
• Fieldcraft Survival Website
• Fieldcraft Survival YouTube Channel
• Fieldcraft Survival Podcast

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Podcast Sponsors

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Transcript Coming Soon

The post Podcast #902: How to Survive Any Worst Case Scenario appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

If you’re heading out to the beach or lake this summer, be sure to know the 10 “quieter” signs of drowning — they’re easy to miss.

Source: Mario Vittone

The post Skill of the Week: Recognize What Drowning Really Looks Like appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

So you know how to start a fire . . . but could you start one in the rain? Whether you’re a frequent camper or an avid hiker, it’s an important skill to have. In an emergency situation, it may very well be the difference between life and death, as fire provides not only warmth, but food as well. Follow the tips above and you’ll never be without the skills to start a fire, even on a damp and rainy adventure. (Note that cutting bark from a tree should only be done in an actual emergency, as this can damage and even kill the tree.)

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

The post Skill of the Week: Start a Fire in the Rain appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

Fishing is generally a pleasant and unpainful pastime (at least if you’re fishing in freshwater for small fry). But one hazard that can befall the fisherman when he’s bringing in a line or untethering his catch is getting a hook stuck in his finger. If this happens to you, you can use one of the above techniques to get the hook out.

The String Yank Technique can’t be performed on parts of the body that aren’t attached (e.g., earlobe, nostril). And if the hook is stuck in your eye, don’t try to remove it yourself with either of these methods! Go to the emergency room immediately.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

The post Skill of the Week: Remove a Fish Hook From Your Finger appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Whether you see some deer, have a fox cross your path, or spot a moose, there’s something disproportionately delightful about encountering wildlife. Even seeing something pedestrian like a possum feels really fun.

If you’d like to have more of these kinds of encounters, and a deeper experience with nature as a result, my guest has some tips for making them happen more often. His name is Dave Hall, and he’s an outdoor educator and guide, as well as the author of The Naturalist’s Companion: A Field Guide to Observing and Understanding Wildlife. Today on the show, Dave and I first talk about the safety and ethical considerations around observing wild animals. We then discuss the best places to spot wildlife (and how it could be in your own backyard), whether there’s a best time of day to encounter animals, and the approach to take so that the animals don’t know you’re there, or if they do, feel comfortable with your presence. Dave shares the gaze to adopt to spy more animals and the signs that will help you find them. We end our conversation with how to practice what Dave calls “spontaneous acceptance,” which may allow you to chill with a beaver.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Field guides and nature-related books that Dave recommends:
  • Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking by Tom Brown Jr.
  • Peterson Field Guides
  • Timber Press Field Guides
  • Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign by Paul Rezendes
  • What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young
  • Touching the Wild by Joe Hutto
  • Beaversprite: My Years Building an Animal Sanctuary by Dorothy Richards
• Dave’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #157 — Primitive Pursuits & Winter Survival
• AoM Article: A Primer on Identifying Animal Footprints
• AoM Podcast #739: Rewild Your Life
• AoM Podcast #194: The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt

Connect With Dave Hall

• Dave’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Whether you see some deer, have a fox cross your path, or spot a moose, there’s something disproportionately delightful about encountering wildlife. Even seeing something pedestrian like a possum feels really fun. If you’d like to have more of these kinds of encounters, and a deeper experience with nature as a result, my guest has some tips for making them happen more often. His name is Dave Hall, and he’s an outdoor educator and guide, as well as the author of The Naturalist’s Companion: A Field Guide to Observing and Understanding Wildlife.

Today in the show, Dave and I first talk about the safety and ethical considerations around observing wild animals. We then discuss the best places to spot wildlife and how it can be in your own backyard, whether there’s a best time of day to counter animals, and the approach to take so that animals don’t know you’re there, or if they do feel comfortable with your presence. Dave shares the gaze to adapt to spy more animals, and the size that’ll help you find them. Winter conversation with how to practice what Dave calls spontaneous acceptance, which may allow you to chill with a beaver. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at AOM.is/wildlife.

All right. Dave Hall, welcome back to the show.

Dave Hall: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Brett McKay: So we had you on the podcast a few years ago to talk about how to survive in the winter. You got a new book out called The Naturalist’s Companion, and it’s all about getting out into nature and observing wildlife. I’m curious, why did you feel like you needed to write this book? Why do you think it’s important for people to get out, not just in the nature and walk around and enjoy the trees, but actually learn how to observe animals?

Dave Hall: Yeah, it’s funny, I’m not a professional biologist by trade, it’s an obsession, really. And what I’ve noticed is that sure, people do get outside. They get out and they power walk, they hike, they go camping, but it always seems like it’s this mission-driven thing, and I’m very content with just being there. And what happens when you’re just there, meaning you don’t really have a goal. It’s really just to be a witness, to be an observer, is that I see a lot of things. I see tons of things, and I’ve talked to professional biologists and birders and they’re like, “Wow, how do you see all that stuff?” And so I felt it necessary to put down in words what I’ve been doing.

I’ve literally had professionals say, “What do you do? I wanna know.” And so really, when I wrote the book, I had to think long and hard about what it was I was doing, and what’s cool is that it doesn’t take any technology, really. It just takes some mindset, the gift of giving yourself some time, and getting out there and putting these skills into practice. And really, what’s to me so cool is we are all here because of these skills. I’m a primitive skills enthusiast, as you know, and we all came from a heritage that used these skills on a daily basis to hunt, to fish, to learn about their environment. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think you talk about it in the beginning of the book, a lot of people get out into the woods and they’ll enjoy the scenery. But something else happens when you encounter wildlife. It never gets old for me. Even when I’m out in the wild and I come across an armadillo by surprise, it’s so delightful. I’m 40 years old, it’s still as cool as when I was a little kid.

Dave Hall: Yeah, no doubt. And to me, it is an utterly complete joy to be in the presence of an animal, especially when they don’t know you’re there, just watching them do their thing, hunt, groom, rest, whatever it is they’re doing. It’s just a complete joy. And for me, it’s really about, one of the reasons anyway, is about relaying that joy and getting people hooked on becoming better observers because it is so much fun.

Brett McKay: Okay. So you talk about the book, you can see wildlife anywhere, you can go to a city park if you want, but if you are planning to go out into the wild, like out into the wilderness to observe animals, the same safety precautions you take for any hike or if you’re gonna go camping overnight, apply. So you’re gonna bring survival gear, dress for the weather, address for the elements, know how to get in and out of where you’re going, but then also now you’re observing animals, you gotta think about animal safety. And people gotta remember that these are wild animals, and I think people have probably seen those videos of visitors that go to national parks and they get attacked by bison. They get out of their car and they walk up to the bison to get a picture or selfie with the bison and I’m thinking… They’re thinking, “Well, these are in a national park, these must be domesticated,” but these are still wild animals. You have to respect them as wild animals, and you got an important safety rule when it comes to animals, it’s this. At no time should you knowingly approach animals that have the ability to harm you. So keep that in mind when you’re out there observing animals.

Dave Hall: Yeah. And I had that very thing almost… Well, it did happen to me. I was fortunate that the buffalo did not make contact with me, but when I was 20, I was in Custer State Park, and I thought I was safe. I made a big semi-circle in this big open meadow, and these two male bison, they were way up by this Visitor Center, decided it wasn’t cool that I was nearby and it was just luck that I didn’t get gored to death. I played dead, I didn’t know what else to do, but you literally, I felt the ground rumble and tremble from their presence, it was… You start praying to anything that you can in that moment, it’s terrifying. And that was a wake-up call. I was ignorant and young, and yeah, I have a healthy respect for what an animal can do, especially these big land herbivores. They’re incredibly powerful.

Brett McKay: So safety, keep your distance, and don’t approach animals that can harm you. Don’t do anything that will startle them. Recognize the fact that there’s wildlife out there that could possibly kill you. What about ethical considerations? Are there any principles that people should take or keep in mind about respecting wildlife while they’re out there observing animals?

Dave Hall: Yeah. And it’s an interesting topic because on one hand, all of the skills that I’m putting in the book can be used for hunting, assuming that what you’re hunting is legal and you’re following all the rules. On the other hand, we don’t wanna unnecessarily stress out an animal. We don’t wanna harm an animal and make its life harder. It’s pretty rough out there. And so I think that really comes down to the individual in that situation, what are your intentions, because if you’re deer hunting and everything’s legal, that’s a management tool that for the most part has been used quite well. And I’m thinking about New York state, ’cause that’s where I live.

When it’s an animal that is not, say, a game species and we’re just trying to get experiences so that we can learn about that animal, we do have to consider being invisible, are we invisible to that animal? If we’re not and the animal is aware of us, are we stressing it out? Or does it notice us and it just keeps its distance and everything’s fine. And that’s something where you really have to be aware of your own impact on the environment. And the thing is, is that people have adverse impacts on animals all the time, and they don’t even know it. You know what I’m saying? They literally tear through the woods on motorcycles, or they’re running or they’re loud, and animals are constantly moving away.

And so these skills will give you the space in which you start to recognize your impact on animals because they won’t necessarily be 200 yards away. So yeah, I think it’s really important to always question your intent and the long-term impacts of what you’re doing on animals. I have beavers that live in my pond right now, and I’ve actually befriended them to some degree, and I have to ask, is there gonna be a long-term impact, a negative impact, on their lives, and my assessment was no. And so I ended up befriending them, and one of them comes over and visits me every night when I sit down there, and she’s not gonna do that to anyone. I’m the person in her life that she can do that with. So yeah, I think it’s a very important question to consider.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And this will come up too when we start talking about how there’s things you can do to lure animals, get them to kinda come closer to you, and sometimes that might be okay, sometimes it might not. We’ll talk about that when we get to that point.

Dave Hall: Sure.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about guidebooks. Are there any guidebooks that you recommend for people?

Dave Hall: Sure. Besides my own, which is less a guidebook and more of a how-to, I’ve got a stack here on my desk. Tom Brown has a great series of field guides, many of them having to do with nature awareness and tracking. There’s great field guides, like the Peterson Field Guides. They have guides for everything. And one of my favorites is Eastern Forests, which isn’t a field guide to animals so much as to habitats and symbiosis and things like that. Timber Press is doing some amazingly beautiful guides to regional specific wildlife. I feel like they’ve really upped the game and created a new baseline for what’s awesome. Stokes, they have a series of guides. There’s a book called The Tracking… Tracking and the Art of Seeing by Paul Rezendes, and a couple of books that aren’t necessarily field guides, but I highly recommend is John Young’s, What the Robin Knows, Joe Hutto’s Touching the Wild, and then a really great book called Beaver Sprite by a woman named Dorothy Richards, and that’s a story about her relationship with the beavers that lived on her property, and it gives you a sense of the importance of making those contacts with individual animals. Well, there’s a few.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And you recommend people actually get a field book, like a field guide where it has the illustrations or the pictures, instead of just relying on Google image search. What’s the benefit of having the book as opposed to relying on the Internet to help you identify wildlife?

Dave Hall: Yeah. They’re both out there these days, I often refer to the internet, but there’s nothing like really reading about an author’s experience. For example, Paul Rezendes’ book, he’s, A, an amazing photographer and amazing naturalist, and he has these great stories. So it’s not just, “Otters do this, A, B, and C.” He’ll talk about his personal experiences, and that to me just is much more interesting and less dry than a field guide. That it doesn’t mean I don’t use field guides, I do it all the time, but there’s something to me that’s much more appealing about that personal touch that you get with a book like Joe Hutto’s, Paul Rezendes, Dorothy Richards. But yeah, it’s important. And some of the books, you simply want them for their density. You want as many mammals in there as you can for your region, simply ’cause you’re going out trying to identify things, and they’re out there too. Lots of great books. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It made me think about Theodore Roosevelt wrote a couple of books on wildlife observations, and they’re great, because not only does he describe what the fawn will look like, but his personal stories… Yeah, as you say, it adds something to it that you wouldn’t get if you just looked at the internet.

Dave Hall: Yeah, for sure. And that’s always what I look for in a good book. It’s like, Yeah, yeah, we all know beavers chew bark and make dams, but I wanna hear something that’s unique to them, a unique story that makes them in an individual.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about best places to observe wildlife. So it can be done anywhere, you can look out your backyard, you can probably see a squirrel or a rabbit, but if you wanna go beyond just the backyard observation thing, where would you recommend people to go to increase their chances of spotting wildlife?

Dave Hall: Yeah, it’s really funny. I literally, and I’m not being short with this, but anywhere. And the reason I say that is because most of our population lives in urban settings, and when I have the chance, when I have a little extra time, I divide it when I’m looking for wildlife between urban areas and more rural areas. And the reason is, is there’s just a density, at least where I live, which is in Ithaca, the south end of one of the Finger Lakes, there is a density of bird life, wildlife.

And to some degree, when you see these animals or birds, they’re somewhat used to people, so that when you do happen to get that glimpse of a fox, it might be willing to hang out at the edge of the golf course a little longer than a fox at the edge of, say, a cornfield. And I’ve spent a ton of time in the last, say, two years, seeing more mink than I have ever seen in my life, and it’s 100%, not 100%, but huge percent all urban mink, and I’ve learned a ton from watching these animals in a semi-urban environment, and so that’s the short answer.

But really, anywhere an animal can meet its needs, those basic needs of shelter, water, places to hide, places to raise their young. Places to do whatever they need to do. And so depending on what you might be interested in, you may have to seek that out. For example, I am going to look for moose up in Northern New York, and they’re not down here in the Finger Lakes. They’re up in our mountainous area, and that’s more akin to Northern Ontario. And so I have to go looking for that species. And while I’m looking for that species, I may also find other species that are akin to the barrier Forest, like Canada Jays or black back woodpeckers and things like that. So really anywhere, but when you get specific or you have a desire to find a certain animal, you may have to seek out that habitat.

Brett McKay: One tip you give, I thought was really useful in the book is look for transition areas and ecosystems. So the line between forest and prairie or just grass or grass in water, because those are areas where maybe the animals will hang out in the forest most of the time, but they’re gonna go out to the grass to feed or they’re gonna go to the water to get water. So look for those transition areas, I think that’s a really good…

Dave Hall: Yeah. And there are all kinds of transition areas. The bank of a creek, that is a one big fat transition area, all kinds of them, and they all offer something different and they can be big ones, like the ones you gave us an example, which was a forest and then you have a more meadow type environment, but they can also be miniature. I was trying to show the kids that I work with a tiny little transition area, and there was a field and somebody had left a bunch of lumber there and it was starting to rot, and that lumber offered a habitat, shelter for the local voles, but they would go out into the field to feed. And so sometimes those little transition areas are almost… Go unnoticed ’cause they’re so small. They’re everywhere, they’re everywhere.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned the urban wildlife, you talk about that in the book. I think that’s really interesting, ’cause that can lead people to think about what’s going on in their own environment in their backyard. So here in Tulsa, I live in the suburbs, the Tulsa suburbs are sort of semi-urban, but we have tons of coyote, there’s tons of deer. There’s foxes. I’ve also seen bobcat nearby, which is crazy. Every time I see a bobcat, I’m like, “There’s a wild cat, there’s wild cats out here in Oklahoma,” it’s crazy.

Dave Hall: Oh, they’re amazing. And that’s something that wasn’t in our area say 25, 30 years ago, and their numbers have done really well. And I think the last two sightings I had were both within city limits of Ithaca, so that’s pretty cool.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So best place to find, you can… Anywhere, but look for transitional areas where maybe forest turns into meadow or a meadow turns into a lake or a river. Are there best times of day to observe wildlife?

Dave Hall: Yeah. And that’s funny because when you read a lot of the books, they’re gonna say a lot of animals are nocturnal or a lot of animals are crepuscular, which means they’re active during the dawn or the dusk kind of thing, sun’s coming up, sun’s going down. And it’s not necessarily true. And I’m gonna use mink for an example. That’s what the books will say, they’re crepuscular, but what I have found is they’re gonna be active any time of the day, as long as they’re comfortable being active. And what that means is if they’re not too hot or they’re not too cold, they’re gonna be out hunting, or they can be out hunting.

So for example, in the winter, when the coldest time of the day is typically in the middle of the night, they’re gonna be out a whole lot more during the day because it makes sense in terms of energy conservation, especially when it’s sunny and bright. If there’s a storm out in the middle of the day, well, they’ll hedge their bets and wait until night. Conversely, if it’s too cold, they’re gonna wait it out. And so a lot of animals are said to be this or that, but really it has to do a lot with comfortable operating circumstance. We know that before a storm, for example, animals such as deer are gonna be out in the meadows grazing to fuel up so that they can ride out the storm with a bit more energy, and then they’ll come out after the storm.

So the best time of day, avoid it. Not avoid it doesn’t mean you should stay inside, but if it’s super hot, super muggy, things are gonna be denning up, riding out the heat in their den, just kind of just trying to stay comfortable. But when it’s comfortable, animals will be out. I’ve seen foxes out during the day bears, coyotes, mink, otter, you name it, the middle of the day, beavers even. So a lot of that stuff is, I think, based on limited experience by whoever wrote the guide book.

Brett McKay: Interesting. Okay. So let’s talk about staying invisible to animals, anything you need to do to stay invisible, a camouflage, what are your tips and tricks there?

Dave Hall: Yeah. So one of the biggest problems, especially for new people is I think a lack of self-awareness in the sense of recognizing that yourself, not saying you or I is enemy number one, but people in general are seen as a threat to wildlife because they’ve been shot at and trapped and it can be hard. And so understanding what baseline is, baseline is when an animal is acting in a life-supporting way, and so as you’re moving into an environment, A, you wanna be quiet, you don’t wanna be loud, and to some degree, you wanna be camouflage, although that’s a somewhat a secondary concern because if you’re loud or apparent, you’re gonna get busted and those animals are gonna go away. But as you slow down and you’re quiet, you’re gonna start to see animals more and more.

And the idea is to ask yourself, “Does the animal know I’m here?” And if not, “Is it acting in a baseline manner, baseline life-supporting?” And if it’s fleeing from you, well, maybe you’re the cause of that, and that’s a good time to do a little self-reflection and assessment of your approach. So those are the some of the tips, and I see people who say, in quote, “I love to get outside”, but they’re constantly scaring things away, whether they know it or not, and so just slow down, painfully is really important, don’t have an agenda of getting anywhere, go 100 yards in your afternoon versus a mile and a half, or whatever it might be, and really go, submit to the experience of just being quiet and slow and that will pay huge dividends.

Brett McKay: And you talk about you don’t hear the word camouflage like you found… Come across plenty of wildlife and got pretty close with wearing a regular jacket or whatever, it wasn’t anything special.

Dave Hall: Yeah. Yeah, as I said, it’s secondary because you could have the best camouflage on in the world, but if you’re loud and you’re moving quickly, you’re gonna get busted. And yeah, it’s true. Most of my encounters, I do tend to wear drab clothes, but I don’t specifically wear camouflage, and I have incredibly consistent close encounters with animals that are not aware of me at all, and I’m thinking about mink, I’ve been watching a pair of otter all winter. I don’t think they’ve ever been aware that I’ve been standing off shore watching them, because I’m still…

Brett McKay: So you talk about this thing called the fox walk, what’s that?

Dave Hall: Yeah, so that’s something that Tom Brown coined. Although I would say that it’s a walk that indigenous people, those who are still living, hunter gatherers still do, but really it’s a way of making sure that your senses are up, meaning you don’t have to look down at the ground because you’re going too fast on your trip, but what you’re doing is you’re basically holding your weight on your back leg, your front foot comes forward much more slowly than a normal walk, and you gently touch the ground, but before you roll it flat and commit, you’re saying to yourself, “Am I gonna crunch leaves or break twigs and announce myself”. And if that is the case, you gracefully move your foot towards a better spot and then you transition your weight, and so it’s probably 10 times slower than a normal walk, but you’re slower, your quieter, allows your senses to be fully up and engaged, and then when you see something, then you can slow down even further, and if your choices warrant you to go closer, then you can move into a stalk or what I’ve been calling a stealth walk, and that’s where we get into the primitive skills of getting painfully close to an animal if you need to or want to.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now, back to the show.: So another tactic you recommend for people to get close to animals is just finding a spot and sitting there for a really long time, what’s been your experience with that technique?

Dave Hall: Oh my gosh, yeah. And if there’s anybody out there who hunts, this is the technique that the vast majority of hunters use, you find a promising spot either on the ground or possibly on a safe tree stand, and you wait, and the idea is you know where you’re going ahead of time, not always, but you pick a spot that is gonna be promising right, the middle of the woods may result in a place that were some deer comes through or coyote, but once again, you’re looking for a promising spot that offers the animal something. So a transition area, a spot near water. And so what this can do is it forces you to be quiet, it forces you to be still, and it’s amazing what can happen. I mean, I’ve literally had animals sitting on me, nothing huge, but… Like squirrel and mice and things like that sit on you, and they don’t even know you’re there because you’re just a stone, you’re a little sage sitting in the woods, and I’ve had tons of things come by. I’ve had Fox at close quarters. I’ve had bear, I’ve had deer, mink, all kinds of things, I mean it’s just countless.

I’ve had snakes slither over my feet. So yeah… So if you’re doing things right, they don’t know you’re even there, you’re just a bump, you are the log with a bump on it, and if you play it cool, they just keep going and you’ve just had this kind of crazy experience. So yeah, sitting can be an incredibly powerful thing to do.

Brett McKay: It just require… It takes a lot of patience.

Dave Hall: It does, and that is something that I think a lot of people will find challenging. We are a society that does not encourage sitting still or being just present, and so some things that can help if you find yourself fidgeting or just drifting away from being present is work a very quiet craft in your hands, for example, like if you know how to make string or carve a stick or fidget with a little piece of grass, anything can help. And then my experience is then once you kinda get in that zone, which you’ve slowed down, you’ve invested in that experience, it’s almost like you don’t wanna ruin it and things start… Magic will start to happen.

Brett McKay: You also recommend people change the way they look or view their environment when they’re out there trying to observe wildlife, and that you talk about softening your gaze… What do you mean by that?

Dave Hall: Yeah, so that’s another skill that I learned through both Tom Brown as well as Jon Young. Tom calls it wide-angle vision, Jon Young calls it Owl Eyes. And the idea is, instead of just looking directly at something, which we do… We do that, that’s pretty much all we really do in the modern world, where you’re say looking at a screen, looking at the road, looking at the blackboard or whatever they use these days, looking directly at something is one way to use your eyes, but the other way is this wide-angle vision, and the idea is… And the way I coach people to do it is you put your hands up left and right as if you’re looking through a window and you notice each hand equally, and you spread your hands slowly until you get to your periphery, wiggling your fingers, if you have to, and if you’re still paying attention equal left and right, you’re gonna notice that you’re not really focused on any one thing, and you can remove your hands, but you wanna stay in that head space, and what that does is it makes you more sensitive to motion.

So for example, you’ll be in wide-angle vision, and you’ll notice, say up to your upper right, the flick of a Robins tail up in a tree, but then off to your left, down the hill a little, you see a flick of a deer’s tail, and when you notice something that catches your interest, then you can use your more focused vision and identify it, but it’s pretty amazing and it’s a fun thing to do. So for example, when I approach a new environment, I just try to soak it in, and I’ll do a combination of both focused vision, as well as wide-angle vision, and it’s amazing if you give it time what starts to pop out. And I do that in any environment, it might not be a big landscape, it might even be a thicket, and I’ve done that with the snakes that use my thicket as their little sanctuary, and I’ll look in and I see nothing, and I just wait and I wait and then it’s like, “Ah I saw a little movement of a tongue, or I saw that that animal move just a little bit”. And so once again, that investment of not rushing, so… Yeah.

Brett McKay: It seems like that’s a good meditative practice.

Dave Hall: I think so. I think all of these things are good meditative practice and perhaps a nice antidote to our frenzied selves.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about animal behaviors and just understanding the life cycle behaviors of an animal that can help us spot the more. What are some life cycle behaviors that people should key in on in general, ’cause every animal is gonna be different, right.

Dave Hall: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But in general, what are some things that people should think about if they wanna increase their chances of encountering wildlife?

Dave Hall: Yeah. So to start at the very basics, it’s that fundamental asking of am I witnessing a baseline behavior or a non-baseline behavior, and non-baseline is interesting because that means the animal is either in the very least concerned and the very most fighting for its life. Whereas baseline is life-supporting behaviors, those are things like, Oh, you know feeding young, feeding yourself, building a nest, sleeping, preening, all those things, right. And then it gets more interesting because you can start to ask more in-depth questions, and that’s called an ethogram, and really that’s just a list of all potential behaviors, and I like to go through like the yearly life cycle of animals when I think about it, for example, right now, birds are migrating, they’re gonna be nesting soon, they’re gonna be denning, if you’re younger animals, those things are being born right now, you have young animals coming out, all these things need to make a living while they’re making a living, they might become prey, it all becomes incredibly dynamic and interesting.

And so for the rookie or the person who’s really trying to wrap their heads around it, just be a witness and just ask basic questions, because if you’re not sure, you don’t wanna fill in the blank and be wrong, so you might see an animal doing something and you’re not sure, and really what I recommend is make a short list of potential things, be open to maybe you’re wrong with your presumptions and give it time, because animals are so dynamic and interesting that they will constantly give you mysteries. I have many mysteries that I’m really not sure about, and maybe with time they’ll get answered, and maybe not, I don’t know, but the idea is don’t rush trying to just put a name on what you think you’ve seen. But, yeah, and one of the more interesting behaviors that I’ve dubbed like cycles of vulnerability are these highlights in an animal’s time when they are especially vulnerable. For me, that I think about fish that are safe in the deep lakes, waters of Cayuga are forced by biology to swim to the shallows to spawn, it’s not a conscious effort or thought, they just have to do it.

Biology is saying, swim up that shallow creek, breed, lay eggs. Get out of there. But while they’re up there, they’re incredibly vulnerable, right. And there’s just things like that, that when you think of any individual animal, they go through these yearly life cycles and points in their life when they’re especially vulnerable to predation, to being hit by a car or whatever it might be, because they’re moving, they’re young, they’re migrating whatever it might be. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah so, yeah you talk about mating and spawning is a time when the animals are particularly vulnerable, but then they’re also very active, that’s a good time to think about, but you also talk about like the environmental factors that could make animals vulnerable, and will give you maybe new opportunities to reserve wildlife ’cause it’ll kinda basically put them out of baseline, so a flood…

Dave Hall: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Or if there’s a drought going on, or any kind of the inclement weather or like a wildfire, that’s gonna change how the animals behave and you might find opportunities to spot them more often.

Dave Hall: No doubt. And one of the more striking examples that we had in the last few years when the pandemic just started, we were all working from home, my wife was on a couch learning how to use Zoom, and we were also in the East… At least in New York, we were in a bit of a drought. And I waved to her, I was gonna go up to the bedroom and read, and it was right around dusk, and I’ll be polite, but she said there’s an effing bear outside. [chuckle] And she was correct, there was a bear outside. And in the first 20 years of our living in our house, we knew that we had seven bears on our property, that spring alone in early summer, we had seven bears on our property, and that was because there was this extra pressure on bears because the environment was forcing them to seek food and opportunities that were risky because they were basically starving, so yeah, that’s an example of the environment inflicting something on them that isn’t always there every year, and so yeah, we had some fun encounters with bears that year, and that bear actually had cubs in the tree. So she was desperate trying to find anything to feed these little bears.

And fortunately we were able to take down our feeder while she was up in the tree and taught her that this isn’t a place to get a free meal ’cause that’s a bad thing when a bear learns where there’s easy access to grain or garbage or anything like that.

Brett McKay: Now, it’s funny you mentioned the pandemic, I remember when lockdown was at the very beginning and pretty much no one was going out, do you see these reports of just wildlife in downtown areas that, it was like, “What the heck is… Why is there a deer in the middle of this downtown? We haven’t seen that”. But the deer were like, “Well, there’s no humans here, there’s no cars, I’m gonna go check things out”.

Dave Hall: Oh, no doubt. I think that happened everywhere, we found that in Ithaca, like everywhere else we had bear, we had raccoons out during the day, there were deers in the center of the city where there were never a deer. Yeah it was remarkably interesting.

Brett McKay: So a fun way to track animals is actually look at their tracks, and that’s where the field guides can come in handy ’cause it’s gonna show you, “Okay, was this a Fox or is this a Coyote or, etcetera, etcetera”. But besides tracks, are there any other signs to be on the look out for to help you spot wildlife?

Dave Hall: Yeah, no doubt there are so many cool things that can be discovered and it’s interesting because a track, if we’re gonna get really kind of specific, most people think it was a track, right, it’s the footprint, but things to look for, and some of these are seasonal and some of these aren’t, but like for example, otter and beaver will push up through thin ice and leave plates of ice off to the side, so you can be like something came up through there, and depending on its size, you can usually narrow it down to like, “Is it a beaver? Is it an otter? Possibly a Muskrat or a Mink”. But there’s things like chews, there’s scat, rubs, the dens and nests that these animals create, there’s kill sites, so you might find evidence of bones or feathers or hair. The otters that I’ve been watching have left some beautiful slides down the slope near where they live, and that’s a fun different kind of a track that we don’t often get to see because they’re not… The animal isn’t that common where we live.

And then there’s things to do that aren’t exactly physical, the idea of listening and being tuned into animals that way, because animals right they’re on either baseline or they’re not, and when you’re listening for that, you can also be pointed towards literal animals. So if animals are acting as if they’re scared or agitated, it’s good to pay attention because they literally may show you where the foxes or where the owl is or whatever, and so that’s another way to tune in and learn from animals.

Brett McKay: Yeah, my favorite ones to be on the look out for are runs, so my backyard, it backs up to a green belt, and you can see the coyote runs, right, “Why is this weird trail there, there’s… No one walks there”. “Well, those are Coyotes”.

Dave Hall: That’s fantastic. [laughter]

Brett McKay: The other one I like to spot when I’m out just hiking is looking for resting sites, so the scene where you see a bunch of grass press down and you think, “Well, that’s probably where a deer was resting, so there might be deer nearby”. Those are my favorite ones to key in on. So yeah, look for different signs besides the animal prints, but look for things like on runs, look for chew marks, bears will claw things, deer when they’re running, they’re gonna scrape their antlers on stuff, and you can see that on the trees as well. That’s another one I like to look for when I’m out and about.

Dave Hall: Oh my gosh. And speaking of bears, so when the bears came to our house, I still wanted a bird feeder, but I couldn’t just hang it off a branch, so I put up a cable, and now I lower it and raise it on a cable with the idea that it’s out of reach of the bears, and so last summer, one of our dogs who’s a hound, was sniffing the tree more than she might normally, and I looked and a bear had come at some point, and I could see the claw marks as it went up the tree, but my system worked. And so, yeah we get bear sign and we’ve had… Left her scat on our property. It’s amazing, they’ve really made a strong comeback in the last decade or so.

Brett McKay: What’s your take on calling or influencing animals so they come closer to you.

Dave Hall: Yeah, so once again, that’s something that really needs to be done with some great consideration if an animal is legal to hunt and you’re in season, there are lots of products that you can buy, deer calls and grunts and duck calls and that sort of thing. For the person like myself, I generally do it as a way to understand their language and motivation, and I largely do these things sparingly, meaning I wanna understand this animal, and so I wanna know if my theory is correct, will this sound or putting out this bait work. And if it does, and I’m satisfied, I typically stop doing it. But I’ve learned something and I’m that much more aware of that animal’s motivation and everything that goes on to… That’s part of its life. And I’ll give you an example. So long ago, when we moved into our house, we had this big big garter snake that I named Helen, and Helen, I could tell was a female because she was much, much bigger than the males, and she had one eye, the other eye had been scabbed over and scaled over and she couldn’t see and she was really cool and rather intimidating size for a garter snake, but we got comfortable with her around the side of our house and she would bask in the sun along to the foundation.

And I thought to myself, “Well, how can I call her? Can I call her? And I didn’t know if I could because I knew, A, if I made too much noise, because I was thinking of using sound that she would take that as a threat because she’s not only a predator, but she’s a prey species, but I felt, “Well, what does she eat? What would she be interested in?” So I took a small twig and I kinda crept in and I took that twig and I just raked it gently against some dry leaves, and she immediately perked right up, lifted her head and came to me, you know, and I have this big snake for a garter several feet away from me. And then the question is, “Well, what was she thinking? What did that sound like to her”. And in my mind, it sounded like an Earthworm or some bug that she’d be interested in, and it worked, you know… And then another way that we used to, I’m gonna say in quotes, call her, is we would hold an earthworm and sneak over her and hold it in our hands, and she would notice this twitching, warm.

She never questioned why there was a warm in the air, and she would literally take it out of our hands, and she didn’t really notice that it was our hand, she just noticed there was something to eat. So calling is a very interesting thing, you do have to be ethical, you don’t wanna be leaving piles of donuts out for bears and habituation them, but it can be a real good lens in which to view wild life and really start to understand what influences them, what appeals to them, what… It gives you a greater lens to their greater life cycle, because it’s a really great lens to look at an animal through… They have their yearly influences, so for example, foxes around here, their urine gets very spunky, you could move that and put it somewhere else, and then the fox over there might be interested and then make mark on that. We have porcupines, we have deer that all can be influenced.

Brett McKay: You have this one chapter on this idea of spontaneous acceptance, what is that? And walk us through that.

Dave Hall: So that chapter diverges greatly from the other ones because everything else is based on, for the most part on being a fly on the wall, being invisible, being quiet and all that, spontaneous acceptance is a much different approach. And there’s really two big categories, and the first one is… Well, in both categories, the animal knows you’re there, so it’s very different, you’re there, the animal knows you’re there, and the first approach you’re really trying to express through body length that you’re a benign indifferent force. So for example, our friend Sarah, who is our neighbor, she farms on her land, and she does this unintentionally, but because she’s up in the fields every day, working in her little barn, working with her horses working in the fields, the local Turkey or the fox were like, “Oh, it’s just Sarah”. And they see her as just part of the landscape.

For somebody who’s not always on the landscape so much, you really wanna check in and watch that animal, you’re probably not real close, and you’re just pretending to forage or you’re digging a hole gently, or you’re just doing something that looks like you’re indifferent to them. You’re not a threat. The other way, and this is a little bit more… Oh, I don’t wanna say new agey, we all trickle when you hear that, but when, for example, you spend time in wilderness to the point where you’ve really slowed down, animals perceive that mentally, if a person really slows down and their brain waves are different than the harried modern brain waves, animals can sense that and they can sense your intention and they may actually come to you, and in both cases, they may actually come to you because they’re seeing you as a non-threat, and they know what your intentions are.

And I can only say that because I’ve had enough experience in these realms where it’s like, this seems like a real phenomenon, and so it’s a hard thing to quantify, but I was in Algonquin Park for 15 days on a solo, and Man, as soon as I got past the agenda of having to go and I just submitted to being in that wilderness, you know, magical things happen and I’ve had animals enter my camp site and they hang out and they’re like Whatever, I’ve been able to paddle pass things like Beaver and herons without them acting in the least bit alarmed. And that’s an odd thing because normally they should be alarmed and they’ll hear you coming and fly away or take off, so that’s a very different concept, and it’s something that I think when a reader is interested, they have to really check in with themselves and be willing to do a little bit of soul searching, if you will, and just slow down and give themselves time to really sink into the experience, because animals are not fools, you can be slow and pretending and somehow they’ll know if your intentions are not necessarily wholesome or good yeah, they know.

Brett McKay: Yeah you talk about you had this experience with the beaver in your pond, you called them mural…

Dave Hall: Mural, yeah.

Brett McKay: Mural, the beaver, and you just kinda… You got used it, you’d come into the pond and he wouldn’t get freaked out, he just kind of like, “Well, you’re just part of this environment that I’m in”.

Dave Hall: Yeah, and I’m glad you brought that up because mural was kind of one of my more significant introductions into the work that people like Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall or [0:42:27.8] ____ do, where they really learn about an animal, not because they’re looking through a scope, but because that animal has accepted them and they’re allowed access into that animal’s world, and so with me, I really became obsessed, and actually, I have a pair in the pond right now that I’m still observing, but mural gave me the gift of allowing me presence, and I had to earn that, because if I had done anything to threaten him or to make him think that I was anything less than a friendly force, I would have breached that trust and he may have just left the pond or gone completely nocturnal, but what mural did allow me was in a way, an odd friendship. I would… It took a while, but I would go down and I would tell him I was coming. I’d say, hello. Who’s the beaver? I had this funny routine, but the idea was to get him used to my body shape the way I walked, to know that I’m just here hanging out, and before you know it within…

I forget the timeline, but he would slowly got closer and closer, and within six weeks or a couple of months, he was eating on shore, grooming on shore within five feet of me, total baseline behaviors, because he saw me as a non-treat, and then that allowed me access to things that Beavers do and beyond the things that we typically know. So, yeah, it’s an incredibly valuable thing. And what the beavers have done is I’ve now become an advocate for beavers because I do lectures on beavers now, and I talk about how important they are and how utterly valuable to our planet they are, they’re probably the most important species we have in North America, and a lot of people don’t think of them that way, but they’re really just remarkable animals, so… Yeah, mural was an awesome experience.

Brett McKay: Well, Dave, this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Dave Hall: Yeah, so my website is davehalloutdoors.com, there’s the book links, and I don’t know, it’s a fairly new site, but I plan to put up lectures and if I’m gonna be running any classes, so… Yeah, that’s my website.

Brett McKay: Fantastic well Dave Hall thanks for your time it’s been a pleasure.

Dave Hall: I appreciate it, this has been awesome. Thanks so much.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Dave Hall, he’s the author of the book, The naturalist companion, it’s available on Amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, davehalloutdoors.com, also checkout our show notes at AOM.is/wildlife, you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com sign up, use code “Manliness” at check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us your review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support, and until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to The AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #883: The Naturalist’s Art of Animal Encounters appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

When I lived in Tijuana, Mexico, fending off roñosos — mangy stray dogs — was a daily battle. Most of the time they were all bark and no bite. Just remaining calm, avoiding eye contact, and continuing on my way was all I needed to do. If they started charging, I pretended to pick up a rock from the ground and feigned throwing it at them. That usually spooked them enough to leave me alone. If that didn’t work, actual rocks were used. There was one time when a dog wasn’t deterred by either the pretend or real variety, and lunged to bite me. I used a backpack as a shield and employed a flurry of kicks to keep the aggressive canine at bay. It finally relented, and I went on my way unscathed.

If you ever encounter a hostile pooch that’s out for blood, here’s how to walk away with jugular intact.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

The post Skill of the Week: Survive a Dog Attack appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

If you’re just getting started honing your pistol marksmanship, you may have noticed that your shots are grouping to one side of the bullseye or another. A small adjustment of your finger on the trigger will likely fix this issue and make your shots more accurate. 

The illustration above and instructions below apply to right-handed shooters. If you’re a southpaw, just flip things. 

Snatching. If your shots are grouping to the right, it likely means you have too much finger on the trigger. When you squeeze the trigger, it’s causing the sights and the barrel to shift to the right. 

Pushing. If you notice your shots are grouping to the left of where you’re aiming, it’s likely because you have too little of your finger on the trigger. When you squeeze the trigger, it’s causing the sights and the barrel to shift to the left. 

Heeling. If you notice your shots are grouping high, it likely means you’re anticipating the recoil from the shot and consequently driving the heel of your palm forward. This causes the barrel to shift up. One drill you can use to fix this is to have a friend load a magazine with a random assortment of live and dummy rounds. When you fire a dummy round, you won’t get the normal recoil and will be better able to see if you’re heeling and shifting up the barrel of the gun. Focus on keeping things even throughout the trigger squeeze. 

Jerking. If your shots are grouping low, it likely means you’re jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it. Abruptly jerking the trigger will cause the barrel to tip down. 

When you place your finger on the trigger, make sure the trigger sits on the middle of the first pad of your finger. And remember to squeeze or press the trigger straight back. Don’t pull. That will just cause you to jerk the pistol and disturb your sights. 

Keep these pointers in mind during your next session at the range, and your shot grouping may end up much more on target.

The post Pistol Marksmanship: How to Fix 4 Common Trigger Mistakes appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Surviving in the wild can seem like a romantic proposition, at least as it often plays out in popular culture and our imagination. We picture ourselves confidently navigating the obstacles of nature, pulling trout out of mountain streams, and building a snug shelter inside a tree.

But the reality of wilderness survival isn’t so rosy. Few people know that better than Jim Baird. Jim and his brother won the fourth season of Alone, a reality show that’s actually real, and leaves contestants in the wild to face the elements and live off the land. Today on the podcast, Jim shares his experiences surviving on Northern Vancouver Island for 75 days, and what he learned from them as to what’s true about survival and what’s simply a myth.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Season 4 of Alone
• “Four Survival Myths That Could Get You Killed” — Field and Stream article by Jim
• AoM Podcast #848: The 5 Priorities of Short-Term Survival

Connect With Jim Baird

• Jim on YouTube
• Jim on IG
• Jim on FB

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Surviving in the wild can seem like a romantic proposition, at least as it often plays out in popular culture and our imagination. We picture ourselves confidently navigating the obstacles of nature, pulling trout out of mountain streams and building a snug shelter inside a tree. But the reality of wilderness survival isn’t so rosy. Few people know that better than Jim Baird. Jim and his brother won the fourth season of Alone, a reality show that’s actually real and leaves contestants in the wild to face the elements and live off the land. Today on the podcast, Jim shares his experiences surviving on Northern Vancouver Island for 75 days, and what he learned from them as to what’s true about survival, what’s simply a myth. After show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/survivalmyths.

Alright. Jim Baird welcome to the show.

Jim Baird: Hi, thank you for having me, Brett.

Brett McKay: So you and your brother were the winners of History Channel’s survival reality show Alone, for those who aren’t familiar with the show, what’s the set up and how long did you and a brother last on it?

Jim Baird: Okay, yeah. Well, Alone is a legit survival show. There’s no camera crews, you have to film everything yourself. One of the things they do is they teach you in-depth how to capture footage, or you have to not only survive out there by yourself, but you also have to film it while you’re doing it, which makes it way harder because you have this other whole task at hand on top of just trying to survive. Right? So it’s like another enormous job you have to do. And how it works is that there’s typically individuals go out there alone, film their survival stint, and then whoever lasts the longest wins a half a million big ones. Now on the season my brother and I were on, instead, each season has sometimes a little bit of a different twist. Well, ours had a big twist because they did teams of family members. There’s brothers, there’s father and son, there’s even husband and wife, however, those team members had to start separately, so they’re calling it Alone: Lost and Found. So literally, I’m dropped off by a helicopter in the wilds of Northern Vancouver Island. I have a very small amount of rations, probably the equivalent to like a light lunch. I have a compass, I have basic survival equipment on me, no map, and I’m told, “You have to find your brother. He’s at the end of this compass bearing.”

And then the helicopter takes off, and I start walking through some of the craziest terrain on planet Earth that you can possibly walk through. And that has a lot to do with the logging there and the regrowth, let alone the many, many lakes and ponds and streams and undulating mountainous terrain. And anyways, so each group had to do this, one person had to find the other. And when you find them, you had to survive together as a team, which is good in some ways because you’re not alone. But also sometimes two people hungry, we can all get a little hangry, can start to drive each other crazy bit and also it’s taxing because there’s only a finite amount of calories in a given area. And when you’re hungry, you don’t really have that energy to move too far potentially to find no more food, if you do move.

So anyways, my brother and I ended up surviving out there all in. We were out there for 75 days through the late fall and winter. Basically, all the food you have, you can bring limited rations. We brought, I think two pounds of pemmican for 75 days, but other than that, absolutely everything that we ate was forage harvested somehow off the land, and we ended up winning after a 75-day stint. It was the rainiest November on record, and we’re talking about one of the rainiest places in the continent and it was the coldest winter in 30 years. So when you have that really damp northern rainforest dampness and that cold, it’s the opposite of a dry cold, man, and you just feel that right in your bones. But we managed to pull it off and come home with the W. I think I lost about 26% of my body mass.

Brett McKay: Man, that’s a lot of weight. So did you have any survival experience before you went on Alone?

Jim Baird: So that’s interesting because I didn’t think I really did, but it kind of turns out that I did. And by that I mean, you think of… Survival for me was something I learned and practiced to an extent because as somebody who has kind of a background in more expeditionary travel. So my big thing is, I’ll take a canoe and enough gear and some food to be in the wilderness for a month. And I’ll travel in extremely remote areas in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic on point A to point B expeditions that include serious, demanding whitewater rapids to be run, portages or portages, as they say, with the English pronunciation of the French word that can take multiple days and up river travel and all this kind of stuff. Sometimes I’ll do those alone. I’ll tackle some of the most demanding whitewater rivers, for example, in the Yukon Territory. I’ve traveled across Northern Quebec and Labrador, well off of the road system. So I do this. I’ve walked solo in the Arctic in winter on remote trips that have taken up to 36 days. So that same year before going on Alone, I walked solo across the Northern Ungava Peninsula, essentially Arctic Quebec, and that was a 36-day solo expedition in the winter.

So, but I’m not lighting bow drill fires, I’m not completely… I’m not eating lizards and flint knapping arrowheads, and I’m not doing these kind of core skills and activities out there that you typically might relate to survival. So I wasn’t really sure how well I would do against people that have those sort of raw traditional skills. However, it turned out that really just having real bush time, real outdoor time in real and real places where you’re forced to get a fire going or you’re pooched or you’re hypothermatic where you can’t just kinda go back inside or walk back to your truck. So those real situations and the drive to push on when things are scary and things aren’t going well and you don’t have any way to get out of there other than on your own two feet. So those things proved to be the survival skills that were really helpful for me out there.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned contestants on Alone are able to bring a certain number of items with them. You guys brought some pemmican, what else did you guys choose to bring and did they turn out to be… What turned out to be the most helpful and useful?

Jim Baird: Yeah. Everybody can bring stuff, so you get 10 items. You also get some items that you automatically are allowed to bring too like clothes. I think a sleeping bag was one that you automatically were allowed to bring, but then you have to pick 10 items. And you can’t just pick any 10 times. You can’t bring a shotgun and a case of scotch, you know what I mean? You have to bring an items… Unfortunately, but you have to bring items out of a specific list. Right? So you can’t just bring any pot, if you choose a pot, it has to be X… It can’t be bigger than what’s specified, I forget what that was. So we brought a fishing line and hooks. We brought snare wire or trapping wire. We brought a bow and arrow. We brought a tarp. We brought a pot and… What else did we bring? Oh yeah, we brought an axe. We brought a saw. We brought a net, a gillnet, but it could only be like two meters long, which is barely any over two yards long and not very tall, so very limiting the size of gillnet you could bring. But one of the things that I kinda learned about is that a lot of kinda emphasis is put on what did they bring? And the show kind of emphasizes what survival items are they bringing out there? Right?

But what we learned is that even though there’s a lot of emphasis on these things, what will they bring? At the end of the day, I don’t think they really make that big of a deal. I think that the fishing line and hooks definitely helped us. You could have picked parachute cord, but you’re only loud like 50 feet of it. And so even though we weren’t allowed to actually actively trap and because there are rules. Right? You can’t… It’s just not no holds barred survival, you can’t catch seagulls ’cause they’re protected. We were Canadian, so Canadians could have got their trapping license in British Columbia, but we were the only Canadians on the show and Americans couldn’t.

So in order to make it fair, there was no trapping. On top of that, there’s no rabbits, there’s very few squirrels, and there’s not really a lot to trap for food there. Anyway, so we brought this snare wire, trapping wire and we used it because we were allowed a significant amount in all different gauges of it. We were able to use it to build a tarp canoe, we were able to use it to build our shelter and a bunch of other things. And the other thing that came in handy that we brought was just fishing line and hooks. And in our gillnet, we did catch some stuff with it for sure, but because of the tides and the waves bringing in all this bull kelp and the barnacles everywhere, really to set up this gillnet was honestly at the end of the day, might have been, even though we did get some food with it, might have been more work than it was really worth.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. So your fishing net, the fishing line came in handy, it sounds like the saw and the act came in handy for fire, would that look like… That was very useful.

Jim Baird: That’s true actually. Yeah, that’s true. We brought this big saw, I don’t know how good it really was in the end, we should have brought the saw I had more experience with, but yeah, I think cutting wood, ’cause it was so cold out to be able to cook, warm up, dry stuff out. I think… And just for morale, I think that was pretty important.

Brett McKay: The bone arrow, not useful?

Jim Baird: Well, you know what it’s like. So the rules were, when we were out there, is that, first of all, there’s very few deer on Vancouver Island, right? So we could get a deer, but we were only allowed to get a buck and you weren’t allowed to get a doe, which greatly reduces your odds, and then we were allowed to get bear however, we weren’t allowed to bait bear. Which we could have gotten some rotting fish or whatever, and baited bears, which is the way to do it really, and so that’s pretty much a shot in the dark, also, on a lot of other seasons in Vancouver Island, there’s bears everywhere. Well, we got in a little later than other seasons significantly, and bears are smart, they knew that it was probably a cold winter on the way, and they decided, I think to just shutter down, so sometimes they don’t even really hibernate on Vancouver Island ’cause it’s warmer climate, but I feel like they did that year because they knew that the coldest winter in 30 years was upon them.

Brett McKay: So you guys were dropped off separately, how far apart were you separated and how long did it take you to get back to each other?

Jim Baird: Yeah, so we were only 10 miles apart, which seems like the thing you can kinda bang off in an afternoon, but what most people don’t realize is how far that really is, it’s quite far north, and daylight was already minimal, so we weren’t getting much daylight. It wasn’t safe to travel at night, so we weren’t even allowed to travel at night, and the terrain was so crazy that 10 miles took me eight days. And you’re talking about… I remember one time I was traveling and there was a bunch of trees that had fallen down on top of each other, and we’re all crisscrossed, and then there was this salal, dense salal bushes growing up everywhere that’s hard to penetrate, and I’m using all my energy carrying a pretty heavy pack, and I climb way up all these crisscrossed tree stacked on top of each other on the side of a hill, and I climbed way, way up this thing… Probably 20 feet in the air, and I step over and I climb all the way back down and into the bushes, and I’d made it like three yards and that to get up and down probably took me like 20 minutes, then I struggled pushing myself through trying to stay on my bearing.

Climbing up, there was one part where it would have been considered a technical climb for me to just get up a cliff that I couldn’t really get around to stay on my compass bearing, so if I had fallen, I would have gotten severely injured and I’m climbing up this thing with a heavy pack, right? Then I hit a lake and it’s a big lake with all kinds of bays and steep mountains, thick, dense hills all around, because as part of the island and it had the crap logged out of it. Right? So then you gotta pick a bearing, you’re gonna pick an object that’s on you’re bearing on the other side of the lake, and then you gotta walk around the lake to get to where the object is, but you’d be surprised at how hard it is to tell where that object is when you’re on the other side of the lake, so then you…

Typically, what I would do is I’d mark the other side where I’d take the bearing from, but some of these lakes were big and it’s hard to see things across the lake, so I’d get sticks or I’d look at my back if there’s a tree that was obvious, it stood out, I just used that, but I’d be stick sticks in the water and bows, and I try to mark it and then I go on, weave my way all the way around this, walking on the shore, and then try to pick up my bearing and I just walk this enormous distance out of my way, and to get to the other side of the lake, which might have been 300 meters, right? And so 10 miles walking through this is extremely different than what one might think in a typical situation, walking 10 miles would be.

Plus, you also are dealing with the lack of food, all I was eating out there, it was wild mushrooms, and I just grabbed like a gaiter, ’cause one of the things we are allowed to bring is ankle gaiters, so I use that as a bag and I tied the end together, and I clipped it to the strap of my bag up by my shoulder upside down as I travel, I collect oyster mushrooms and chanterelles, I’d be throwing like banana slugs in there, I had an opportunity to try to get a gross and I whipped to stick at it and missed by one inch, which was devastating and… Yeah man, and that’s what I do every night I get to camp. I’d set up my tarp and then you gotta make a fire and when everything is soaking wet, soaked, it’s very hard to get a fire going. I can do it, it just takes time. You don’t have a lighter, so you just have a Ferrocerium rod which throws out sparks, so what you gotta do is it’s driving rain, you’re soaked, you gotta find a standing dead tree because anything on the ground is gonna be pretty much soaked right through a very challenging work to whittle out the dry Center, so it’s the inside of the tree you want.

So the inside is dry, you gotta bring that under your tarp, you gotta split it out, you gotta whittle little feather sticks like little curls that’ll light from a spark I’d be taking Usnea moss, which is called old man’s beard drying that out, keeping it with my sleeping bag in a water-proof pack to try to… A waterproof compression sector to try to keep that. Try to use that as tinder, but you’re looking at a long process to get a fire going probably a couple hours to get a fire going because you gotta whittle your tinder then little matchstick size pieces, then cigars size pieces, then bigger, then bigger. And then eventually you can start putting the wet stuff on through the process, and then I cook up all my mushrooms at night, and I’d eat a whole bunch of these soggy boiled mushrooms. The other thing I tried eating was lily pad tubers out there, and I reboiled them a few times, but they still almost made me barf ’cause they’re just so bitter and… And then I put them in my hat and I’d wake up the next morning and I just eat these soggy ice-cold mushrooms the next morning, they’d be like the old slogan there, I just eat it.

I called it the breakfast of champignons, and then… Yeah, and then I’d pack up. I usually set my tarp up in such a way that it would collect water ’cause it’s always raining, so I’d be able to scoop rain water out of the back of my tarp, I put rocks there to kinda make a little catch, and then I just keep going the next day, but it was very mentally challenging because you don’t know if you’re gonna get there that day, you don’t have a map, right? And I guess this is kind of the reality too of a survival situation, you don’t know if you’re gonna be saved that day or never. Right? It could be the next minute, it could be years, it could be never. So it plays with you mentally, and so I keep traveling, traveling, traveling and thinking that I was gonna get there, and I think what they thought when they gave us this mission, was it’s gonna gonna be like four days, so they kind of alluded that it might be like a four-day hike, I don’t think they realized it was gonna take us this long and be that challenging, so… Yeah, it was really, really, really, really hard.

Brett McKay: You know, yeah, it looked hard, and I think the thing I learned from that is, never underestimate a hike in a survival situation. Because I think people they think like, “Oh, I’ve been on a 10-mile hike before. Not a problem.” You’re on a trail, you guys didn’t have trails, you didn’t know when the hike was gonna be over, you had to deal with the weather. Sometimes I saw some people, they didn’t even hike on some days, because it just rained too much, it was just downpour.

Jim Baird: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And then the food, the food, the calorie element really came into play, you could see, a lot of the contestants, they’d start off strong, but as the days wore on, it just… They got slower and slower because they just didn’t have the calories.

Jim Baird: Yeah, like no way I could have done that survival hike on day 75, right? Because at the beginning, I could really push myself despite the fact that I wasn’t eating anything for… Other than these mushrooms, right? And I’d try fishing, but it’s kind of like, you think… You don’t have a boat, right? And you come up to these ponds and there’s probably trout in them, there’s probably small rainbow trout in them, right? But, the spot that you’d come out in, it’s like, the water is like 6 inches deep for many, many feet out from shore, and there’s not gonna be any fish there. You don’t have a boat really, how do you get out to where there might be fish, without putting in a lot of effort and then potentially not catching anything? So I tried to fish in these lakes, but I think maybe the fish were just deeper. And then maybe over on the other side of the lake, that could be a good spot.

And then you bush whack all around the lake and you’re going through mud and you’re trying to follow the shore, but there’s boulders and you’re on the side of a steep bank and it’s super hard using a ton of energy, and then you get over to the spot that you thought would be good for fishing, and you look down and it’s too shallow. So I was trying to fish, I maybe had one spot, I put a lot of time trying, but I couldn’t even get a bite, and I think maybe by that time, it had just gotten colder and the fish had moved to a deeper water far away from shore, so I think, yeah, I think that a lot of people think, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna catch fish.” I think sometimes because of those logistics, like I explained, it can be more challenging than you assume it might be, to actually catch fish in a survival situation.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for words from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So, if you read survival books, they had to talk about the survival priorities, and like one of the first ones is shelter. What did you guys use for shelter, for your stay there?

Jim Baird: Yeah, I think that’s for sure. Shelter, fire, water, food. Sometimes, fire and shelter can be maybe, arguably interchanged. But yeah, I think that’s super important. My brother and I, we actually… We didn’t really… Like, we’re not in an area where we get those winters of minus 20, and we had a decent winter sleeping bags too that were good down to minus 30. Of course, they don’t really block wind. So, we basically ended up building. My brother was more or less sleeping in a tarp tent, then we had a more substantial shelter going, and my brother was mostly focusing on trying to fish, trying to get food. And when I got there, he’d already started building a boat, but he hadn’t put a ton of time into a shelter. So, we had something more substantial going, and we found that we just didn’t have the resources at hand, in our site to complete that shelter.

Because, everywhere else, it was this… Stuff that had been logged for the most part, but as we got to where our specific site was on the coast, there were no small trees, everything was these gigantic trees, right? So, you know, 1000-year-old, 2000-year-old cedars and probably Doug-firs and hemlocks, a lot of massive old hemlocks, and you can’t chop those down and drag them over to build a shelter. So, just to find the wood that we had… And then we started… Everything is like an underground stream there, so we had torrential downpour for days and days and days, and… Or even where we had our fire place, under the fireplace, there was a stream going through, and when our fire place dried out that dirt so much, it collapsed into an underground stream. So like, there’s so much water, everything’s so wet. And if it rains enough that underground stream starts to come above land, so it’s really crazy, if you’re not used to this kind of environment.

You can be… You know set your tent up on a spot that looks perfectly dry and flat, and be sitting there, all tickety-boo, and you get a ton of rain and all of a sudden your tent is in the bottom, pitched on a creek bed. Right? So, this started happening to us and watching the show, a lot of other people got swamped out, so my brother and I saw this was gonna happen, and in the middle of the night, we ended up basically building a raised platform, so no matter what, if it flooded and if the bottom of our shelter turned into a stream, we would be off the ground, but I think it took 21 logs to build that platform. And that was all the small logs we had in our entire area. So, I’m talking about… Hemlock is heavy, man. Like Hemlock is a heavy, heavy wood, it’s technically a softwood, but it’s probably the heaviest softwood.

So, imagine you’re already gassed, I already walked for eight days, bush whacking through hell, eating freaking nothing but mushroom, to show up and still have minimal, minimal food rations, working a lot, expending energy to try to get more food and then putting whatever time we have into building this shelter, and then all of a sudden having this push because we’re about to get flooded, and at night, probably two weeks into this with never having really a proper meal yet, and expending a ton of effort, I’m bush whacking in the dark, going through like steep, up and down hills. Like, abrupt, steep, up and down hills through dense bush, trying to find smaller trees, chopping down these hemlocks and dragging them back, trying to keep bows on them, trying to keep branch on them too, because we utilized those bows as kind of a bedding mattress, pulling them through, cutting them up, laying them down.

It took over 21 of these logs, and we’re talking about two… Maybe five inch thick logs to just make a platform for both of us to sleep in, and then stakes and ridge-pull, and after that there was no other material really for us to build a proper shelter, so we ended up basically just deciding that, what we do is we just pull back on this bigger shelter idea, sort of like a smaller kind of cabin idea, and we would just build this raised bed and then make a tight A frame. So we didn’t really… We just had a sleeping platform and it was open at both ends, so we’d have to crawl in from either ends, but it was like an A-frame with a tarp, right? And then we had another tarp just adjacent to that, outside, where we would have our fire and that’s basically all the shelter that we went with for the entire time.

Now, we planned on getting out there and not going crazy with the shelter, sort of maybe getting more established before putting a ton of energy into building a shelter, because we’re not… We don’t need the comforts of home so much, my brother and I, we don’t really care about that so much, about a good shelter. Like, we’ll just sleep outside on the dirt really, right? So it ended up kind of becoming okay, but what we did, because we had this really cold winter is, we would cut firewood, and then, as we are cooking our food, we’d heat up all these rocks around the fire, I don’t think they show this in the show, but we’d warm up all these rocks and then we’d just tuck all those rocks in our pockets, at the small of our back, down by our feet, and we’d have a toasty warm sleep, because we had this wonderful heat source keeping us warm all night.

Brett McKay: The shelter thing was really interesting to watch all the contestants, you’re trying to figure out… Because it was basically, you’re always doing these calculations, like, “Okay, we can invest a lot in a shelter”, but if you invest all that time and energy in a shelter, well then, you’re gonna wear yourself out.

Jim Baird: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But then also as you said, there’s the risk of… Okay, you build this nice shelter, but then it’s gonna get flooded out. And so, one of the takeaways I got there, maybe when you’re in a survival situation, simpler is probably better when it comes to shelter.

Jim Baird: I think, yeah, as simple as you could do it, but it really depends. When the… A season of a Alone, when they’re up on the Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, north of 60, you need that or you’re gonna freeze to death. You need a much more… A simpler… You can build it the faster… As long as it’s efficient, it’s about efficiency is what it’s about, right? That is mandatory, but we won the show, so obviously we did something right, as many things as we felt we could have done better, we obviously did something right. And I think the takeaway there is that, you are reduced to the resources that are available in your area, and one of the things that we don’t realize is when you get there, you very quickly become hungry and you very quickly lose energy and you don’t have the energy.

And maybe at a certain point, this is like a ship wreck scenario, at this point, you don’t have the energy to just get up and bush whack through hell, to try to get somewhere over there where the grass might be greener, only for the odds on finding a spot, that is just the same as where you just were in all likelihood. You think, “Oh, we’re gonna build a shelter. Oh well, there’s all these wild edibles, you can pick… This is great. Are there any of them… Are there any of those things around you? You’re gonna build a shelter, great. Are there any materials available to build that shelter around you?” Right? If the answer is no, well, the answer… It’s the other thing too, that we think that if you’re this really good survivalist, and if you have all these skills and abilities… You remember like in the movie Rambo, right? He was this like, crazy bad ass that could… You could drop him off naked at the North Pole and he’d show up with a dog sled team, in a polar bear jacket and all this kind of stuff, you know the issue with that is that, that would take like magic, right?

Because it doesn’t matter how good you are, if there’s a finite amount of resources in your immediate area, no matter how good you are, you can’t manifest any more calories that are gonna be harvest-able, so you really are limited to that reality, when you’re out there in a survival situation. So sometimes you just… You have to adapt, you have to do the best you can with what you have, but even… No matter how good you are at times, you might not be able to get a sufficient amount of food, and we’ve forgotten so much how much food we eat. We’ve really lost touch with how much we eat because you don’t realize that if you’re expending all this energy and time goes by, you can’t just get one more big meal and be right back where you were a week before after eating nothing. You need a sustained amount of significant meals, day after day after day, to not feel very weak and to be on a slow decline to starving to death.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that was, I think the biggest challenge was food for the contestants who made it past the first few weeks. What I thought was amazing, or what I thought was interesting is, a lot of the contestants, they washed out really fast, ’cause they just weren’t mentally ready for it. But also something they just got… There’s little things, they just slipped and you fell, and you think, if you’re in civilization that wouldn’t have been a problem, but when you’re out in the wild, that’s a problem. That’s a big problem.

Jim Baird: Yeah. So, it’s so easy to kind of be an arm chair quarterback, because there’s things you hear and you learn, but you don’t really know them. There’s only so far the language can go in articulating these things, you don’t really know them until you’re really out there. So when I went out there, I remember watching a previous season and it took a guy 21 days to build a boat, and he built a really nice boat, like a nice kayak, I guess it was maybe a little tippy, but it was just freaking beautiful. So, I remember thinking, “Well, you know, geez, we wanna build a boat, but we’re gonna go out there and we’re gonna build one, not as pretty, but we’re gonna build it faster, so then we have a boat right away. Geez, why did it take him so long to build that boat?” And when I got out there and we built it, my brother was doing most of the boat building, it took him 21 days, the exact same length of time.

And that is because I didn’t realize the amount of time it takes each day to find food, catch, forage, prepare that food, cut firewood, cook and eat. And so then at the end of the day, you have a couple hours maybe to work on a project, one of the things that me and my brother built, which you didn’t see or that I made, was really nice cedar paddles. I did a really nice job of building these beautiful paddles, and then you just saw us using them, and I think people thought they were one of our items, but I built these paddles. But yeah, and then… So, you’re limited, where as if you’re at home and you’re working on a project in your garage, you could bang off in three days, what would take you two to three weeks out there.

Brett McKay: No, yeah, yeah.

Jim Baird: You know what I mean? Yeah, so that’s the difference. So that’s my calculation from my experience, three days a project… Okay, so me and my brother just for another little video that we did, we did for Field & Stream magazine, building a tarp boat that we shot, it took us two days, it was a hard two days, but it took us two days basically to build… To find the materials and build this tarp canoe. On Alone, that took us three weeks.

Brett McKay: Right.

Jim Baird: And just kinda let that sit with you for a minute and compare that to so many other things, and that’s something that I think we really don’t understand. And so that brings us into, kind of, one of the myths, which is in that article for Field & Stream magazine that I wrote… And this is sort of a myth that I’ve never really… I’ve read other articles on survival myths, but I’ve never seen this expressed, probably because most people have never, wisely, have never fallen into a situation where they need to survive long-term like I did, and sure as hell didn’t do it for fun, to test these things out. [chuckle] Because they didn’t have a $500,000 reward. So yeah, you look at these survival books, and they have all these cool things in there, you know what I mean? And they have all these different kinds of shelters and they have all these different kinds of traps, and you look at them and you’re like, “Well, maybe we’ll build two shelters. We’ll build a shelter like this here, and then… ”

It’s good to know all these different kind of shelters, don’t get me wrong, because each shelter might take different materials to build, and those materials may or may not be at hand, so the more different types of things you can build with, the better. But we’re, “Maybe we’ll build a shelter here, then, if there’s a good fishing spot, down on the coast, maybe we’ll build a second shelter there, and then we’ll build the boat and we’ll build this and we’ll do… ” But in reality, it’s like, you can pick one or two of those things. You can’t do all these things, right? And so it’s kind of a myth, that you look at this survival book and you think in a survival situation, there’s all these things that I can do, but in reality, you can’t really. You can do one or two of them and you have to choose wisely, because it could… What you spend your energy on, will potentially waste all that energy and then you won’t have the energy left to do anything else that actually would help you. So it gets to a point where you’re constrained by the walls of your own weakness.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting to see all the contestants, like the last three. Like, when they started doing things, they just talked in terms of calories like, “Well, that’s gonna take a lot of calories.”

Jim Baird: Totally! Yeah.

Brett McKay: “So maybe I don’t do that.” So, you mentioned… So, one of the myths… So, you wrote this article talking about the myths of survival, you mentioned one of them there is like, you can complete a whole bunch of survival projects or these bush craft projects, and you’re saying, “No, you’re limited. It’s gonna take you a lot longer because the calorie restrictions is gonna prevent you from doing that.”

Jim Baird: The calorie… The calorie restriction, but also the amount of time that it takes you to get those calories, to find those calories and then eat them, you only… You can’t just work all day, day after day, on projects, right? Maybe at the very beginning, you have… For me, all that energy was soaked up from my hike.

Brett McKay: So I think the takeaway here is that, a lot of people think when they’re out in the wild, they’re gonna be be able to do all these survival projects, but projects, they take energy, energy takes calories, and then getting calories when you’re out in the wild, that just takes a really long time. It’s like most of your day trying to get food, so you’re just not gonna have either, the energy or the time to do very many things. You and your brother did attempt a couple of survival projects, you built a crab trap, and it seemed promising, but then, you ended up losing it, it sunk. And then you also built this really cool tarp boat, but then you found out, using it took a lot of effort, and then the fishing didn’t turn out to be as effective as you hoped, so beyond the fish, you did catch, what did you and your brother subsist on?

Jim Baird: The other thing we could get was limpets, and we learned that limpets are like these half-shelled snails that cling to rocks and they’re very hard to pry off, and you can’t see very many of them in the daylight. But what we learned was that at night, at night is when you get these kind of super tides and the tide would go way out. So, we ended up spending a lot of time at night because what would happen is the limpets, we learned, are nocturnal and they’d come out from under the rocks and when they’re on the move, you can just grab them and pick them off with your hands, instead of having to pry them off with a knife, right? So, we’d come out and I’d get these… Like, we used our gaiters as basically foraging bags, these like, ankle leg gaiters. And we’d just pick these, pick, pick, pick and just throw them all in these things, and then we’d get these other things called chitons or gumboots, they’re also called, which have this… The shells across the top, but they almost taste like chewing one of those super, super bouncy balls. And so, they were super hard to chew, but they were edible, and I actually cracked two molars and had to have a root canal when I got home, from biting into one of these shells too hard, that I didn’t see ’cause it was dark. And then, the other thing on that…

But the thing is that there’s kind of this myth too that on Vancouver, people say, “Oh, you’ll never starve on the coast.” But unfortunately it’s just not the case. These limpets, they’ll get you somewhere, but there’s no fat in them. And we are eating shore crabs, shell and all, even. We just gave up on that ’cause we realized it wasn’t worth our effort. So there’s no nutrients in it because the French Canadians call it mal de caribou, caribou sickness. It’s also known as rabbit starvation. But the word, the technical word for it is protein poisoning. And it means rabbits are so lean, no matter how many rabbits you get and snare or even lean venison or a moose you will still starve to death because your body will not be able to digest the protein. If you get a moose early in the rut, late August, there might be fat on it. But yeah, if you get a caribou with not a lot of fat on it, you could eat that freaking caribou. You could be eating steaks every day and you’ll still starve to death. So it’s, there’s another myth for you is that you think that you get out there and you harvest a moose, that you’re good. Well, not really. And so that’s why you realize how important fat… Fat is life. Beaver, to a lot of indigenous people in North America, Beaver is very, very fatty. And not just for the meat in the beaver, which is good, but that fat could be used in other things.

Black bear has a lot of fat on it, waterfowl. And that’s one thing I forgot to mention in the article. A lot of people… Once people got shotguns too, especially the Northern Cree on James and Hudson Bay, where there’s a lot of migration paths would focus on… A lot of them would eat geese and fish. They wouldn’t even… Sometimes they’d get some meat, some caribou, some moose, but they’d focus mostly on their diet through waterfowl and fish because waterfowl are really fatty. But without that you’ll starve. And so that’s what was happening to my brother and I. We were focusing on these chitons and these limpets and shore crabs. And one night I went out and I picked a thousand limpets and we would eat… We’d boil them and we’d eat and we’d eat and we’d eat. And it just wasn’t doing it for us. It was the weirdest feeling. But one thing we did have was we got into these things called gunnel fish, which were basically these gross, writhing eels that can kind of breathe outta water. And they’ll kind of hide and breathe just through the kind of moisture on their gills and they’ll hide under the rocks at low tide. So we go out when the tides are out and we’d lift these huge boulders and flip them over and we… But close to the end we’d be literally blacking out. We’d have to sit down because our energy levels were so low and there’d be nothing.

And you’d lift up a huge boulder and there’d be nothing. You’d sit down, then you’d lift up a huge boulder and there’d be five or six of these gunnel fish. And some of them were not longer than your pointer finger. And some of them were some of the biggest, we caught fish we got the whole time. Some of them were a foot long and you… We’d try to stab them, we just start stomping on them. That’s how we figured we’d kill… We figured how we’d kill them. The best way is you’d stomp on all these things. So that was actually some fish and it was a sour-tasting fish. It wasn’t good. But that’s actually was still fish. So I think even though we weren’t able by angling methods really to get as enough fish to sustain us as long as we did, we were able to eat all these gunnel fish and that’s what probably won us the show.

Brett McKay: Okay. So that’s, I think it’s interesting even if you’re eating food, it doesn’t mean you’re getting nourished necessarily because you gotta have that fat component.

Jim Baird: Yeah, and that’s definitely one of the myths. Who thinks that you couldn’t go out there? Especially after the rut, which is a moose, which is the ungulate of the deer family, their mating season, moose, elk, caribou, and all the different types of deer, white-tailed deer, mule deer, black-tailed deer. You’d think that you get a moose and you’re good but it’s just unfortunately not the case because you need more fat or you just cannot digest that protein and you will still starve over the winter.

Brett McKay: So something you’ve said you found out through this experience on Alone is that practicing survival skills is not the same as practicing survival. What do you mean by that?

Jim Baird: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s kind of what I was getting into when my concerns about going into this. Well, am I really a survivalist? I plan my trips and I do these extreme remote wilderness trips, but I’m bringing a good fishing rod with me, fishing rod reel, a backup one, I’m bringing good quality store-bought manufactured lures. I’m bringing a shotgun with me for bear protection or food if I… In season, if I have to. And all these things. I’m bringing lighters. I don’t just bring one lighter, I bring 10 lighters, I throw them all in each bag just in case. But what I realized is that… So put it this way. You can, practicing survival skills and real survival are two very different things. We could head out into the backyard and we could practice lighting a bow drill fire, that would be fun. But an enjoyable kind of skill to learn. But try that when you’re exhausted, soaking wet, you have to source all the parts. You just walked through hell for days on end. You haven’t eaten a thing on days on end. And if you don’t get this fire going, you’re gonna die of hypothermia. That is terrifying. It is not fun. It’s not a situation you wanna be in. So what happens is that somebody can learn a lot of different really cool survival situations, survival skills, bushcraft skills.

But if they’re never actually using them in a real scenario, in a scenario where they can’t just walk back to their truck or walk back into their house instead, if it starts raining, they’re never actually gonna learn the actual mindset that survival actually takes. And so I remember I was on this trip and we were getting the tail end of Hurricane Irene in Labrador and we are living off of fish and berries for almost a 1/3 of our calories. And we did hunt some wild geese and stuff and we’re on a 33-day expedition and it was… We are soaking wet, we are cold, it was miserable out. And I said I said to my buddy Marty, I said… Marty’s like, “Oh, my God, how are we gonna get a fire going?” And I’m like, “Don’t worry Marty, this is a good opportunity to practice how to rig a tight camp when it’s cold and raining. And he looks at me and he’s like, “This isn’t practice man. [laughter], this is the real thing, Jim.” [laughter] And I just remember that being so funny. But sure enough, because I’m a nerd about this stuff, I cut down that standing dead tree, I set up the tarp, we got a fire going under the tarp and we eat in the smoke and everything that. And that situation, those situations I was in are the situations that give you those survival skills that you can’t learn from a book, that you can’t learn on YouTube.

And that skill is just being able to not give a crap. And not giving a crap is probably the best survival skill. And the only way you get that skill is through real bush time. And typically that needs to be in areas that are pretty remote, and where the weather’s not always good, where you have to deal with getting tortured by mosquitoes to the point where you don’t give a crap about the mosquitoes anymore. Where you might have to… Because you know. You say, are you… Am I cold? Or you’ve been this cold before and you know that, you know what, I am cold but I’m not gonna get hypothermia so I’m just gonna stop thinking about it because it’s not really an issue, because you’ve had that experience where if you’re somebody else might be scared. They might be scared that they’re in danger, they might know all these survival skills, but they don’t really know if they’re in danger or not, or they’re just not used to the discomfort.

And a way you can start, you start to realize that you’re getting this skill is through let’s say you’re out on a long adventure on a camping trip with other people and you’re still having fun and they are not having fun anymore. You’re in the exact same situation as them. They’re starting to complain, they’re miserable, you’re still having a wonderful time. You’re in the same situation than them, it’s just that you have learned to not give a crap anymore because of your experience and being able to rough it and knowing that it doesn’t matter. And so that essentially is the best survival skill to have. And so that’s why having survival skills, as long as you can get a fire going, having all these survival skills from what Alone has kind of proven. There’s all these kind of survival experts on it and some of them… It’s usually the guys with the real bush time, the longest periods of time spending outdoors that do the best. Not necessarily the guys with combat training and not necessarily the guys in these scenarios, with the most primitive skills. I don’t like to use the word primitive, but the most traditional kind of skills aren’t always the guys that win. It’s the guys that can just kind of take it the hardest. You know what I mean?

Brett McKay: Yeah. So yeah, that’s the key to the mental game. Just don’t give a crap. I think you can apply that, that’s applicable to anything in life. Just don’t give a crap.

Jim Baird: Sure. Yeah. I like that actually. I should start applying that to other trolls that troll me on my YouTube channel. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Right. Yeah. You should trademark that. Don’t give a crap. So you mentioned at the end of this thing you lost about 25% of your body weight. What else? Health-wise, what were you guys like? Did it just totally wreck you physically?

Jim Baird: I would say, yeah. I was pretty ripped afterwards. My brother was kind of looked emaciated maybe because I might have had just a little more fat and muscle than him going into it, even though I was bigger. So technically I take more calories to go into it. So what they… What they tell you is they give you kind of a refeeding program and this is part of the torture. You can’t just get back and just hammer a freaking pizza. The torture continues ’cause you have to slowly wean yourself onto food. You can’t even eat anything. You’ll vomit if you try. And if you eat a whole bunch of sugar all of a sudden, it can be really, really bad. It could trigger horrible reactions in your body that could kill you even. So I ended up kind of weaning myself back on, but then I kind of went… Started going a little crazy. I had something called iritis, which is arthritis of the eye, which is caused by refeeding syndrome. The doctors don’t know anything about this ’cause which is testament to our society, very few people are starving to death anymore. There’s the Minnesota starvation experiment during World War II where they starved… A bunch of people starved and they tested them and they followed them. So that we have learned about starvation through that, but in general it’s not really something doctors understand around here.

And so I felt like it was hungover, I had a headache for two months coming out of it, which was pretty miserable. And then eventually I was okay afterwards. But yeah, if I probably, if I had been a little stricter on a refeeding program regimen… The only thing doctors are kind of used to is the same thing that a severe alcoholic who’s not eating any food, who’s malnourished might experience when they’re… When they stop drinking because they’ve malnourished themselves. That would be the only kind of comparable thing that doctors might deal with nowadays on average.

Brett McKay: So Jim, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work and what you’re doing these days?

Jim Baird: Yeah, I’ve been putting a lot of time into YouTube, doing some awesome adventures, survival stuff and all that. Check out Jim Baird-Adventurer on YouTube. I’m also on Instagram at JB Adventurer and Facebook too, Jim Baird adventurer. So follow me online, check out some of my videos and drop a comment and say hi.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well Jim Baird, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jim Baird: Thank you Brett. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Jim Baird. He was one of the winners of season four of Alone. You can find more information about his work at his YouTube channel, Jim Baird-Adventurer. Also check out his articles on Field & Stream and check out our show notes at a aom.is/survivalmyths, where you’ll find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Header over to Stitcherpremium.com. Sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android, or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate you taking one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #869: The Survival Myths That Can Get You Killed appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

If you live in a place where snowy and icy winters are the norm, you know the dangers of falling through the ice. And this guide is especially pertinent for those areas of the country where freezing weather only visits sporadically. When frigid temps descend for a short time upon a location that’s not used to seeing them, people, especially children, are apt to go out exploring their neighborhood ponds and reservoirs. As you can imagine, this creates a danger because the cold weather hasn’t been around long enough to create ice strong enough to walk on. That very scenario happened here in Tulsa a few winters back; two young men, in separate accidents, both drowned when venturing out onto a thinly-frozen creek and pond. So be sure to share this guide with your kids after you study the info yourself.

While no ice is guaranteed to be safe to walk on, the general rule of thumb is that you should only venture out onto clear/blue ice that is at least 4 inches thick. White/snowy ice should be double that thickness. For more details, review our guide to figuring out if ice is safe to walk on.

By the way, we’re not making up that bit about your beard; it’s just one of the ways facial hair can make your winter better. Watch this video for this and other fascinating and life-saving insights from a hypothermia expert and thermophysiologist.

Big thanks to Lieutenant Harold Osborn of Denver’s North Metro Fire Rescue District for consulting on this piece.

The post Skill of the Week: Survive Falling Through Ice appeared first on The Art of Manliness.