Tag: Bushcraft Tracking

Two Ponies & The Burren…

September 19, 2022 / pioneerbushcraft@gmail.com

By Sean Fagan

**The Burren of west Ireland is one of my favourite places to wild-camp. It's a wonderfully wild, evocative landscape - full of contradictions (Photo: Sean Fagan, west Ireland).**

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.
J.K. Rowling

Recently I've been thinking about what makes an adventure.

I can only answer for myself and my answer comes in two, connected parts.

Firstly, adventure should be something that challenges you. The second, related part - is exposing yourself to the unexpected.

Whether you’re walking, paddling or cycling through wild places - along with camping in such places - you expose yourself to the unpredictable. In effect, you're breaking away from your everyday life and becoming part of something vast and unpredictable - nature.

And out there, in nature - unforeseen events are always unfolding.

What gets me sometimes is - a lot of the unexpected is funny, if not downright comical.

Adventure doesn't have to include the grandiose, the grand spreading vistas, the conquering of many miles of challenging terrain.

Adventure is also about moments, often unexpected moments - that fill us with something good.

Tracking is many Things

August 16, 2019 / pioneerbushcraft@gmail.com

By Sean Fagan

The gist of this post it to present tracking as the multi-faceted activity that it is. Tracking is very much about engaging your senses and mind with all the minutiae of sign left by living things. It’s often challenging and fascinating.

Oddly, the majority of tracking books are mostly devoted to the tracks and sign of wild mammals and some bird species. But what about amphibians, reptiles, even fish? What about the vast array of invertebrates (of which insects are only a part of the huge number of invertebrates inhabiting earth).

There is so much to see and investigate – so many meanings to tease out.

A common misconception about tracking is that trackers are always striving to seek one of the holy grails of tracking – a super clear print of the foot, preferably a thread of foot prints leading to the actual animal they are tracking. This level of tracking is rare, and highly skillful.

I think a lot of us are familiar with the often stunning documentaries depicting the San Bushmen of southern Africa tracking wild game such as antelopes. Often, they track their quarry until they get a kill. This level of tracking is not only very skillful but generally outside the scope of the casual, or even more serious, tracker.

But tracking (even if our life doesn’t depend on it) is a tremendously enriching, calming and immersive way of engaging with nature...

Coyotes & The Aroostook River

October 24, 2015 / pioneerbushcraft@gmail.com

By Sean Fagan

Eastern coyote track (Photo: Sean Fagan).

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Memories of Maine

The Aroostook River

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For three months of 2009 I lived in a remote camp with two companions in the northern woods of Maine, USA.

Living conditions were very basic.

Despite the relative lack of comfort and modern conveniences, I had a great time, partly because I lived near the clear, wide waters of the 180 km long Aroostook River.

One very memorable moment occurred one morning, after a brief swim in the Aroostook...