Many weekdays pass here in near silence. Hours can go by without seeing another person. In such conditions, the land tends to speak a little more freely. -Chad
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Underneath the fashions of colour, clothing, philosophies, health benefits, and footwear is the rather simple business of going for a walk in nature. The senses seem to recognize the arrangement. For a while, the modern urban life can be directed into the spam filter, and the woods become a perfectly reasonable place to be.
John Muir understood something of this, as did Henry David Thoreau, who was suspicious of a walk in the woods that left the mind on issues of town. Sigurd Olson called it the Singing Wilderness. The names and philosophies vary. The walking remains much the same.
There is something about the repetitive motion of walking, particularly when there is nowhere that one urgently needs to get to, that allows small things to make their way into attention. A movement in the brush. A bird call. Something on the ground that requires another few steps to identify. The memorable parts are often no larger than that. I like looking for them, especially the ones that arrive outside the usual senses.
After a while, the walking itself seems to become enough. The ground changes underfoot, the air changes with the trees, and there is always something just far enough ahead to keep going toward it. But, almost as though in defiance of some modern bylaw, the best show often begins with stillness. Sit down and observe.
It is even better when someone else, especially your own kids, finds the path and begins noticing the same things. There is some satisfaction in watching a person, or a dog, discover that the woods are worth paying attention to. Dogs generally arrive at this conclusion rather quickly. Re-creation.
(also under People & Pets page)
2026 Oct 04.
Clear skies for the Mississippi-Madawaska Land Trust Fall Colours Walk at cliffLAND, warm for an October day, with little cloud or breeze to speak of. The timing seemed arranged in advance with the reds, oranges, tans, and browns of the leaves, the kind of coordination no one could take credit for but everyone was glad to accept. Fall colours often peak around Thanksgiving, is typically peak colours.
Volunteers and staff met people at the trailhead, directing cars, pointing out the trail, and generally making the business of arriving seem simple for a large event. Local craftspeople had set up nearby, several neighbours running for office among them, out of politics for the afternoon and simply neighbours again.
The trail tunnelled through young forest, with the path littered by the round, trembling specks of aspen leaves catching light and shade in close to equal measure. With hundreds of people moving through, there was no keeping track of who had arrived with whom. People stopped along the trail to talk, and some of the conversations I heard went well beyond weather and leaves, into plans, half-formed ideas, and matters that had little to do with fall colours. A dog or two slipped its lead long enough for a tumble with another, and for a few minutes their owners appeared to have other things to discuss.
Toward the lookout, a few more people stood ready to explain a plant or a view, sometimes for the second time. Every rest-stop bench was occupied. Gentlemen and the generous gave up their seats anyway, while others stood and talked. Cameras came out repeatedly, for other people’s views of the same colour everyone had come to see.
The day went off without incident, apart from the car trouble that turns up most years. A flat tire this time, with help close enough that it barely qualified as trouble. Some of the hikers had come from well beyond the usual radius, including people from Cornwall, a two-and-a-half-hour drive for an afternoon among the reds and oranges. Community.
As for black bears, the first day of my college wilderness survival class, every year, gets the scary ideas about animals out of the way. It is quite a waste of energy, not to mention the stress, to be worried about black bears as a common source of danger. We tell bear stories and talk about the typical behaviour of Canadian bears. I usually mention Lynn Rogers, the Jane Goodall of black bears, who spent decades observing them at remarkably close range. I attended one of his lectures, and what stories he told. Mostly funny, and all educational.
There is plenty of bear sign on most of my walks in the woods, so much that one eventually learns to find it almost on command. I am grateful for this. What would it be like to live in a forest, so far from its best, where there are no resident bears. For sign, take a look at a large beech tree. Some have a cluster of dead branches high in the canopy that looks rather like a nest. A bear nest, in a sense. The bear climbs out along a branch to reach the beech nuts, breaking and gathering branches as it goes. The nest of broken branches can remain for years. The smooth bark often carries the scars of the climb, obvious claw marks and sometimes smaller scratches. Turned rocks are another familiar sign, usually the work of a bear looking for grubs. The mud or sand beneath a stone can tell you how recently it was turned.
Tracks are the best find, whether in snow or mud. I have spent a couple of hours in woods where there seemed to be tracks everywhere, fresh ones at that. After a while I began to wonder if the bear was avoiding me as I tromped around following the day’s muse. What a nuisance I must have been. Scat is another obvious sign, usually dark and full of seeds and whatever else has been on the menu. Fur is surprisingly uncommon in what I have found.
One afternoon, while picking bearberry leaves, I was kneeling quietly when I heard the muffled snap of a dry twig. I stood up. A year-old cub stood there. We noticed each other for a moment, then it retreated up a tree just out of sight. Mamma bear swung into action. She came off the little path, also used by deer, and moved through the thickets at a tangent to me. A distance, I believe, she felt nervously safe enough to try to get my attention. There were loud snorts, like a deer will sometimes make, followed by false charges that amounted to little more than a step or two, paws sweeping the ground. The cub was beginning to get upset by the commotion above. Mamma kept it up. She was remarkably healthy looking, with a shiny black coat and brown nose.
I stayed uselessly beside a tree at the edge of a ridge. Leaving meant walking either toward the cub or slightly toward Mamma, so I waited, which proved to be of no help. I took a step. Mamma was silent. A second step, then a bunch more, and that was that. I did keep walking with some enthusiasm. A grouse will sometimes run along the ground with a theatrical broken wing, drawing attention away from chicks–too young to fly. The bear’s actions brought the grouse to mind.
About five minutes later, I came upon a deer drinking within fifteen feet or so. What a day for close encounters. None of these were tamed-yard sorts of animals. I was wearing moccasins, if I remember correctly, so my steps were pretty quiet. Instead of stopping for the deer, as I normally would have, I kept moving.
I have known various people who have been bothered by every colour of bear we have in Canada. Except for a polar bear, the firsthand reports involved no contact, though they were close and frightening. A former college roommate had one such encounter at a fishing camp, where a black bear made repeated charges for no apparent reason. No contact was made. Eventually the bear was shot after approaching another person in the same manner. Encounters like these are rare. It is not an unhealthy or hungry back bear that attacks, it is a sick (i.e., deranged) bear. Most of my bear stories are about how wild and difficult to see they are. I have little doubt I have walked past many without knowing it. Other times, the bears were uncertain that I was there and made themselves sheepishly known.
One camping trip, I looked for and found a muddy area to get a good raccoon tracks to plaster. The plaster, when mixed properly, takes about fifteen minutes before it can be removed. I waited, mostly silent, and amused myself by drawing on the upside of the plaster while it dried. Then came a loud, curious groan from an animal about ten metres away. It sounded like something with a deep chest. I took it to mean the animal had been letting me walk past, staying quiet until it wondered whether I was still there. Message received. I decided to move on. After all, the plaster was about dry enough. Not another sound.
Heavy mist gathers on the clothes like a light rain, softening the horizon and drawing the landscape into a more intimate space. The Saddleback trail seems made for such days, whether the name comes from its shape or simply from someone’s imagination. The White Pine Ridge, with wetlands on either side, opens to a new view every few hundred metres. At either end of the saddle, it is worth stopping, made that much more primitive by the sepia-tinged colours of fall filtering through the mist, the rugged hills clumped close together.
A cottage appears now and then in the distance, but otherwise the landscape feels much as it has for a long time. As I orient my mental map to the terrain, I begin to see why the trails pass through low places and around wetlands, where the beavers’ work begins to explain the landscape.
We can call almost anywhere nature, and our minds are quite capable of making the distinction. The body seems less interested in our definitions. There is something different about being immersed in a landscape like this, away from the mechanized rhythms of the urban world. Even the phone, useful enough for photographs, seems a violation of the time.
“The view is worth the climb” is a tired cliché. But on this trail, there is a little wink in the phrase, that if expalined, has something to do with how the senses drift through the view.
A person can walk through the woods for years and see very little of what is happening there.
That is not an insult. Most of what happens in the woods is deliberately difficult to see. Animals are not especially interested in making themselves available for observation, and the evidence they leave behind is often temporary. Snow softens. Rain erases. Leaves fall. Tracks collapse. A bent stem straightens. Whatever happened may be gone by the time you arrive.
Tracking begins by taking those remnants seriously.
When I was learning, I measured everything. The size of the individual tracks, the distance between them, the pattern of movement. I recorded details that sometimes seemed excessive. Some of those measurements eventually solved mysteries that had been sitting around for years. In one case, the missing piece was simply the size of the track. Without it, the evidence was incomplete. With it, the possibilities narrowed considerably.
There is something satisfying about that kind of knowledge because it is not really memorization. The animal has already left. You are reconstructing an event from what remains.
A track is therefore more than a footprint. It has a size, a shape, a direction and a relationship to the tracks around it. It sits in mud or snow that has its own story. Weather alters it. Time alters it. The animal’s movement alters the pattern. Eventually you begin looking at the ground and realizing that what appeared to be a depression is actually a small piece of history.
That is why the reference books are useful, but they are not the most interesting part of tracking. A book can tell you what a fox track looks like. It cannot make you notice the track in the first place. Identification is satisfying, but observation is where the activity becomes something more.
The same is true of the little tracking kit. A ruler gives the track scale. A camera preserves it. A notebook makes you describe it. A magnifying glass encourages you to look closer. Even drawing a track changes what you see. When you spend twenty minutes drawing something, details that were invisible at first have an irritating habit of becoming obvious.
The woods have not necessarily become more interesting. You have simply become harder to fool.
There is a particular pleasure in that. You begin to notice the small things that previously belonged to the category of background. A track in the snow. A disturbance in leaves. Hair caught on a branch. A cavity that deserves a closer look. The woods start producing evidence.
Eventually you may not need the ruler very often. You look at a track and have a sense of its size. You recognize patterns without calculating every distance. The kit becomes less necessary because some of it has moved into your head.
That is perhaps the best thing about learning to track. It does not give you more things to carry into the woods. It gives you more things to see once you get there.
And once you begin seeing them, the woods become a rather busy place.
Thoughts related to “Animal Tracks: reference books for novice trackers” and “The Essential Kit for the Animal Tracks and Sign Enthusiast,” Episodes 19 and 20 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, July 27 and August 3, 2024.
Three Lemons
There is a peculiar moment in a wilderness trip when nothing is wrong, exactly, but the trip has begun acquiring a character.
The boot is wet. Someone is tired. The trail has taken longer than expected. The weather has become less convincing. None of these events deserves to be promoted to an emergency. Outdoor life would become rather impractical if it did. You deal with the boot, stop for a few minutes, check the map, put on another layer, and continue. The problem is not the individual inconvenience. It is that they have begun arriving with suspicious regularity.
This is where experience earns its keep. A beginner tends to evaluate each problem on its own merits. Someone with enough time in the woods starts noticing the direction in which the problems are pointing. That distinction is subtle enough to be missed and important enough to matter. A wet boot means very little. A wet boot on a person who is already cold, several kilometres from the vehicle, with less daylight than expected, belongs to a different sentence.
The Three Lemon Rule grew out of that kind of observation. One lemon is life. Two lemons are worth noticing. By the third, I am generally interested in the company they are keeping.
There is also the matter of human attachment to a plan. We become strangely loyal to decisions once they have cost us something. Three hours of walking creates an argument for walking another hour that has nothing to do with geography. We have already come this far. We are almost there. Turning around would mean that the last three hours had been spent going in the wrong direction, which is apparently more difficult for the mind to accept than spending four hours making the same mistake.
The woods are refreshingly uninterested in sunk costs.
They also have a habit of making preparation look excessive until the day it doesn’t. A spare layer, fire-making equipment, water treatment, navigation gear, food and other small redundancies can spend years accomplishing absolutely nothing. That is generally considered a successful career for emergency equipment. Its purpose is not to be useful on every trip. Its purpose is to prevent one bad afternoon from becoming a very long one.
After decades of teaching survival, I have become less interested in the supposed spectacular mistake than in the moment when a person still has several easy ways out and does not recognize their value. Options tend to disappear quietly. By the time you are cold, lost, injured and running out of daylight, the decision-making has become considerably less democratic.
The first lemon is therefore the useful one. It is still possible to dismiss it, which is precisely why it deserves a little attention. By the third, the woods have usually stopped being subtle.
Thoughts related to “The 3 Lemon Rule: Staying Safe in the Outdoors,” Episode 18 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, July 20, 2024.
That distinction sits quietly underneath the conversation between bushcraft and ultralight backpacking. They can look like opposite approaches. One has a reputation for knives, canvas, wool and the means to make things in the woods. The other has become remarkably good at making a backpack, tent and sleeping system almost disappear. But bushcraft was never really about rejecting modern equipment. It is about having skills that remain useful when the equipment is unavailable, unsuitable, or simply not worth carrying. The old technology is still there, waiting in the background.
There is another difference, though, that has less to do with weight and more to do with where the objects seem to belong. Bushcraft has an aesthetic, and it is not entirely accidental. Wood, leather, canvas, birch bark, wool and cordage made from natural materials tend to look as though they have some business being where they are. A wooden-handled knife does not announce the town from which you came. A piece of plastic sometimes does.
That can sound superficial until you spend enough time in the woods to notice how much of the modern world you have carried in with you. Plastic buckles, synthetic fabrics, moulded handles and small pieces of machinery are remarkably efficient, but they also remain visually and materially connected to the industrial world. There is something slightly odd about travelling into a place to get away from the built environment while bringing a miniature hardware store with you.
This is not an argument against modern equipment. Modern equipment is often extraordinarily good at what it does. Ultralight backpacking has taken the same impulse toward efficiency and pushed it in another direction. Weight can be removed from fabric, hardware and construction until the object becomes almost an abstraction of its former self. The result can be wonderful. It can also mean accepting that a tent intended to last five years is a different proposition from one intended to last twenty-five.
The same calculation appears in packs. A good lightweight pack and a good heavier pack can cost roughly the same. The lighter one is not necessarily cheaper or poorly made. It has simply spent more of its design budget on being light. The heavier one may contain more material and survive years of abuse that the lighter one will not. One saves your shoulders. The other may save you from having to buy another pack. Five years or twenty-five is therefore not a trivial question. The scale measures the weight. It does not measure the years of service that came attached to it.
Bushcraft approaches the same problem from another direction. Knowledge can reduce what needs to be carried because the woods themselves become part of the equipment. If you know how to make something, you don’t necessarily need to carry it. If you know what materials are available and how to use them, an item that would otherwise have to be packed becomes a possibility rather than a possession. That is one of the more interesting bridges between bushcraft and ultralight travel. Both can reduce the burden. Ultralight does it by removing material from the equipment. Bushcraft can do it by putting more capability into the person carrying it.
And then there is the aesthetic choice, which is harder to put on a spreadsheet. A birch-bark sheath, a maple-handled knife or a piece of canvas may not perform some measurable task better than its synthetic equivalent. But they belong to a particular way of being in the woods. They keep the objects around you visually connected to the place you went to find. Perhaps that matters because going into the wild is never quite as simple as leaving the city behind. We carry some of it with us. The question is how much of it we want to notice.
After all the effort to reduce weight, I still have a lightweight Mora with a maple handle and a birch-bark-and-leather sheath. The plastic sheath would work perfectly well. It would probably be lighter. The birch bark serves no compelling technical purpose outside of a field replacment from knohow if need be. I like it.That seems reason enough to carry it.
in consideration of: Thoughts related to “Ultralight & Bushcraft Backpacking, Part I” and “Part II,” Episodes 16 and 17 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, July 6 and July 13, 2024.
My daughter once took a cattail pillow to school for show and tell. She was in kindergarten or Grade 1, and when she announced that she had a cattail pillow, the teacher and the other children apparently assumed she meant a pillow made from cats’ tails. It took a little clarification before everyone understood that the pillow had been made from the brown sausage-shaped heads of cattails. Fortunately, no cats had been involved.
It is a good story because cattails are one of those plants that become considerably more interesting once you know what they can do. Most people recognize them as the tall plants with the brown heads growing in wetlands. A bushcrafter eventually starts seeing the list of possibilities. Food. Mats. Insulation. Cordage. Footwear. Hats. And, in this case, a pillow. The plant has been standing there the whole time. We were simply late to the conversation.
The pillow itself is remarkably comfortable. Cattail fluff has some of the qualities of down, although it is denser and heavier, and after a while it tends to become matted and clumpy. It is not going to replace every pillow in the house. That is probably just as well. The point is not to manufacture a superior bedroom. The point is to take something growing in a wetland and discover that it can become something you use.
The first full-sized pillow I made took about 120 cattail heads. That number changes the character of the activity rather quickly. A pillow sounds like a simple project. One hundred and twenty cattails sounds like a harvesting operation. For a half-sized pillow, about sixty heads is enough, which is much more manageable, particularly with children. You find out how much material you actually need before you have committed yourself to filling an entire pillowcase.
Where you collect them matters. If there are only twenty or thirty cattails in a patch, taking sixty would be a fairly impressive failure of arithmetic. There are wetlands where cattails occur by the tens of thousands, and that is where the harvesting makes sense. The idea is not that you are going to destroy a wetland by taking a few dead heads. It is that the place should be able to absorb what you take without your harvest becoming the most significant event that happened there that day.
Getting into the wetland is part of the activity, particularly with children. Old running shoes work well. Rubber boots work until the mud decides to keep one. Sometimes you end up knee-deep in muck and water. Sometimes you don’t. Either way, I would rather have a child discover that being wet and muddy is part of being outside than grow up thinking that nature is something you can enjoy provided it does not get on your clothes.
I learned some of that from Martha Weber, who was taking community youth groups into the woods well into her late seventies and possibly into her early eighties. Martha was a wild edible plants expert and knew an extraordinary amount about what grew around her, but she also understood children. She wanted them in the woods, not merely looking at the woods. Her point was that if young people do not become comfortable with mud, water, plants and the general untidiness of being outside, it becomes harder to immerse themselves in nature later. There is a surprising amount of outdoor education that can be accomplished by allowing a child to get dirty without treating it as an incident.
There is also a useful bit of botany hidden in the pillow. Cattails grow from rhizomes beneath the muck, producing new leaves in spring and developing their familiar brown heads through summer. The heads from the previous year can remain through winter, but once they have opened, moisture can get into the fluff and spoil its usefulness. The best heads are still intact and brown, not green and not already blown open. You can test one by picking at it. If it immediately wants to become a cloud, you have found the right one.
Then comes the stuffing, which is where the project becomes considerably less tidy than the finished pillow suggests. The fluff gets into your hair and floats around in the breeze. Keep your mouth closed. When you pull your hand out of the pillowcase, some of the cattail seems to regard this as an opportunity to leave with you.
The other thing you discover is why this is not really a summer-camp activity for a hundred children. Sixty cattail heads for one small pillow becomes six thousand when multiplied by a hundred campers. There are not many wetlands where that would be a reasonable afternoon. With a small group, you can teach the harvesting as part of the craft: find a large stand, take what you need, move to another area if necessary and pay attention to what you are doing. With a large group, the arithmetic starts working against you.
That distinction is important in bushcraft. The skill is not simply knowing what can be harvested. It is knowing when, where and how much. The wild is not a craft store with an unlimited inventory. Sometimes the most knowledgeable thing you can do is walk past something you could use.
Still, there is something satisfying about carrying a cattail pillow home. A child has gone into a wetland, collected material, watched it turn into fluff, stuffed it into fabric and ended the afternoon with something they made themselves. A plant that had been part of the background has become familiar. Next time they see cattails, they may not see brown sausage-shaped things at all. They may see a pillow waiting to happen.
That is one of the reasons I like simple bushcraft projects. They give the landscape a little more vocabulary. Once you know what a cattail can do, the cattail is no longer just a cattail. Cat-tails have many other uses we will get to later.
Thoughts related to the Cattail Pillow Craft: great craft for ages 4+ is Episode 13 of the Reverie Nature Podcast.
Bushcraft has a habit of putting very old solutions in very modern company. A friction-fire set can sit beside a lighter. Hand-twisted cordage can share a pack with paracord. A wooden tool can be carried alongside stainless steel and titanium. The materials have changed rather more quickly than the problems. Fire is still fire. Shelter is still shelter. Something still needs to be tied to something else.
That makes cultural ownership an interesting question, because some things have a very particular history and some things seem to have traveled everywhere. A basket, a fire-making method, a style of clothing or a musical instrument may have deep cultural meaning in one place while the underlying idea appears elsewhere, developed independently or carried across generations and borders. The flute is a particularly good example. There are ancient flutes from different parts of the world, made from different materials and belonging to different traditions. Finding the first flute would be a difficult project. Finding the first person who thought, I wonder what happens if I blow into this, is probably beyond the archaeological budget.
Cultures have never been particularly good at staying in their assigned boxes. People move. Ideas move with them. Materials change, tools get adapted, and somebody eventually improves an idea that somebody else thought was already finished. That does not erase the cultural history of a particular object or practice. A traditional design, ceremony, song or teaching can belong very specifically to a people. But it is worth distinguishing that history from the basic human solution underneath it. It is difficult to claim exclusive ownership of the idea of twisting plant fibres into something useful when people in many places appear to have arrived there without consulting one another.
This is where my conversation with Rick Beaver got more interesting than a simple discussion about whether a particular bushcraft skill is culturally appropriate. Traditional knowledge is not simply a collection of techniques that have survived long enough to acquire a label. Knowing how to make something is only the visible portion. Knowing where to find the material, when to gather it, which material to leave alone, how to read the conditions, what the finished object is for, and what you are expected to understand before you start can be a much larger body of knowledge. The part that fits neatly into a demonstration is often the smallest part of it.
I have encountered that gap repeatedly in my own work with wilderness experience, primitive skills and traditional technologies. I have also spent enough time studying the wilderness experience to know that the skill itself is only part of what is happening. One of the clearest lessons came from learning Arctic skills with elders. After you’ve built a few igloos, there is a dangerous little moment when you begin to think you know how to build an igloo. The blocks go together. The spiral works. The roof closes. There is an unmistakable satisfaction in standing inside something you have just made out of snow, particularly when the weather outside has become less theoretical. Then you go out with an elder again.
Sometimes what you learn is a small adjustment. Sometimes it is dramatic enough to change the whole way you approach the job. A different reading of the snow, a choice of location, a change in construction, an understanding of what the conditions are telling you before you have even cut the first block. The surprising part was not that there was another technique to add to the list. It was that I had mistaken the list for the knowledge.
That is an easy mistake to make with traditional skills. We like things we can carry home as instructions. Cut this. Twist that. Build here. Light this. The instructions are useful, but they can give the impression that once we have performed the sequence correctly, we have acquired the skill. In reality, the sequence may be the least interesting part. The deeper knowledge is often in knowing when the sequence needs to change.
It is also why I am reluctant to turn every old skill into a question of cultural ownership. Some questions absolutely matter. If a practice carries a specific cultural history, ceremony, identity or responsibility, then that history is part of what you are dealing with. It should not be peeled away from the practice simply because the practical part is convenient to teach. But there are other things that have been invented, reinvented, borrowed and modified so many times that trying to locate a single owner becomes an exercise in drawing borders around human ingenuity. And then there is the rather inconvenient fact that wilderness does not care very much about our paperwork.
If you are actually in a survival situation and you need a fire, you make a fire. If you need shelter, you build shelter. You use the knowledge that is available to keep yourself alive. As Rick put it, sometimes you ask forgiveness later. That is not an argument against cultural awareness. It is an argument for putting the questions in the right order. Warmth first. Provenance when you can feel your fingers again.
The questions are still worth asking afterward. Where did this particular practice come from? Who carried it forward? What am I learning beyond the mechanics? Is this something that has been shared widely across cultures, or am I dealing with knowledge that has a particular relationship to a people and place? Those questions become more useful when they are asked with enough knowledge to distinguish one situation from another.
Perhaps that is what years around traditional skills have changed for me. I am less interested in deciding that everything belongs to everyone, or that everything belongs to somebody. Both positions are too tidy for the history of human beings making things. Skills travel. Cultures influence one another. Some knowledge remains deeply rooted in a particular people and place. Other knowledge has wandered so far that its original footsteps are impossible to follow.
The trick is noticing which is which.
That requires more than knowing how to light the fire, split the root, twist the fibre or build the shelter. It requires knowing what you are looking at. And, occasionally, knowing when the person who has been doing it for fifty years has just noticed something you somehow missed after doing it fifty times. That is usually when the lesson gets interesting.
Related consideration on Bushcraft, Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Appropriateness is Episode 12 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, featuring Chad Clifford’s interview with Rick Beaver.
Staghorn sumac is one of those plants that can become difficult to take seriously. It grows along roadsides and ditches, prefers open ground, spreads quickly and will happily colonize a yard if given the opportunity. The young branches are covered in short hairs that feel like velvet, which explains the name. Later come the red berry clusters, standing upright above the leaves.
It is also remarkably useful.
The berries can be made into a drink. I take two or three clusters, put them in about two litres of water, swirl them around and leave them for a few hours. The little hairs on the berries carry acidic juices, which wash into the water. The result has a pleasant citrusy bite. A little sugar or mint improves it, and it is particularly good chilled.
There is one small complication. Rain washes the acidic material off the berries. So a beautifully red cluster collected immediately after a storm may be less useful than it looks. The berries need a few dry days to recharge, so to speak. Sumac has apparently developed a beverage department with weather-dependent hours.
The friction-fire use is less obvious. What first attracted me was not the wood itself but the amount of dead, dry wood that remains on a living plant. Sumac grows in open areas where sunlight and air can dry those dead branches while they are still above the ground. That makes them unusually accessible when you are looking for material that is already cured.
Finding a straight eight-inch spindle is another matter. Sumac will send young shoots straight upward for several feet, but those are not the dead pieces you need. The useful dead wood tends to come in shorter sections, which means you have to work with what the plant has actually provided rather than what you might have ordered.
Then there is the centre of the wood. Young sumac branches have a soft, foamy core. As the branch gets older, that core sometimes remains while the outside becomes harder. For a bow-and-drill fire, that turns out to be an excellent combination. The harder outer wood creates the heat. The soft centre breaks down into the fine material that becomes the coal. The spindle, baseboard and handhold can all be made from the plant.
That was something I had not found described elsewhere. I had experimented with a lot of woods for friction fire, and sumac turned out to have an arrangement that was particularly well suited to it. The plant had, quite accidentally, put two different materials in the same piece of wood.
The same soft centre makes sumac useful for something considerably less smoky. Young shoots can be hollowed out easily, which makes them suitable for pipe stems and potentially traditional flutes. I have made traditional wooden flutes, but not from sumac. The possibility is there because the plant has already done the boring part of making the hole.
Where sumac really earns its keep for me is maple tapping. I have made thousands of wooden spiles from it for heritage demonstrations. A four- or five-inch piece of young sumac can be cut, half-piped, have the soft centre removed and be tapered at one end to fit into a maple tree. With a little practice, the whole thing takes less than a minute.
The diameter is convenient too. Those young shoots happen to grow to about the right size for a maple tap. You can make a short spile with a place to hang the bucket, or a much longer one that reaches beyond the widened base of the tree and lets the sap drip into a container on the ground. Older wooden spiles in sugarbush camps were often half-piped as well. Exactly why is uncertain, although making the hollow easier to clean and reducing the possibility of a frozen tube splitting are both plausible explanations. I would leave them as explanations rather than turn them into facts.
And that is probably the part of bushcraft worth paying attention to. Not every useful thing in the woods arrives with a known purpose. Sometimes you notice what a plant is already doing and work from there. Sumac has a foamy centre, dead branches that dry in the sun, young shoots that grow to a useful diameter and berries that can make a drink.
It also grows back. Cut some of the young shoots and the root system sends up more. Leave it alone for a year and a half and there can be eight-foot stalks everywhere. You can overharvest it, of course, but you have to work fairly hard at it.
So staghorn sumac may be a weed, depending on your relationship with your yard.
In the woods, it has rather better credentials.
adaptation from A Bushcrafter’s Guide to Staghorn Sumac is Episode 11 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, released June 1, 2024.