“Please sir, may I have more,” I tease as Carl pours each person on the tour a bit of maple sap. The Hudson Highlands Nature Museum staff refer to themselves as edutainers. Carl, who led this maple syrup production tour from the tree to the table, has mastered the art of educating and entertaining while [...]

Style, like DNA or fingerprints, is what identifies a writer.

Here are some techniques you can use to create the appropriate style for your written work:

Finding a blow-down, where a live tree has fallen down, can be a lucky opportunity in a survival situation. The pine tree that fell just before our survival class began, provided pine needles for tea, pine inner bark for food, boughs to cushion and warm the floor of our shelter and baskets for heating liquid [...]

This takes attention to detail, practice, and patience, but it does work.

I’m lucky to learn from people who have been teaching for many years. They have a fine-tuned presentation that I find inspiring. They also know which books and which online sites provide the greatest value in keeping up with the continuous stream of new mycological information. That’s a huge time saver. Once again, I am [...]

This is an adaptation of a recipe I found in a cook booklet, Old Pioneer Recipes. I am deeply grateful to this writer and historian. The original recipe called for two squirrels, onion, butter, flour and Tabasco sauce. My recipe includes more vegetables and three sources of wild meat.

I haven’t experimented with hide tanning for years. Back then, I used a hide scraper to remove membranes, fat and meat from a wet hide. I had no idea it was even possible to scrape a dry hide clean. The red squirrel that found my trap provided an unexpected opportunity. I started with basic instructions [...]

I dug out my old notes from Tom Brown’s Advanced Tracking class. Either I took really good notes, or I copied them over right after I got home. I took Advanced Tracking in 1991. How time flies. Virtually everyone I respect in the world of wilderness survival has taken classes from Tom Brown. He’s a [...]

The wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) is an escaped cultivated parsnip, according to every forager I consulted. The important thing to note is that the leaves can irritate your skin. The root is the desired edible part of the plant.

This is the first time I cleaned a skull without an expert at my side. I have only two other fresh skulls in my collection; the rest I found while hiking. I wasn’t willing to bury this red squirrel skull and wait for the dung beetles. I knew that by boiling the skull, I would [...]