My first night of Bird Language with Andrew the Bird Guy. My reasons for getting into Bird language were while having my leg in a brace for six months I would sit in my caravan doorway feeding the Rosella Parrots and listening to their conversations and wondered what they were saying to each other.
Where I’m currently located I’m not far from a major highway. Not much in the way of wildlife. I have Major Mitchells, Kookaburras first thing in the morning (5am), Minor birds, Sparrows and Magpies. Were supposed to be on the look out for Pied Currawongs and Owlet Night Jars But I have never heard their calls in this area. Its a two hour drive to decent bush land now.
Several good books were mentioned including The Peregrine by J.A. Baker and Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane. Ive noticed that the birds in my front yard have differing feeding times. The Sparrows feed at a different time to the Minor birds and then the Magpies come in after them.
The Sit Spot :
My past sit spots I have watched the Rosella’s mentioned above and had one place where I could sit for hours watching Wedge Tailed Eagles soar through the thermals. Here I have a chair in my front yard where I sit of a morning and do my rehab exercises for my knee with a cup of tea and talk to the birds. The Magpies have become so used to me that they now fly down to greet me every time I go outside to carve a spoon, to watch the traffic go past or take photos of the sunset..
I listen to their calls. The young ones wanting to be fed, the teenagers calling for mates. The mother takes care of them all with a care I have not seen before. I believe they usually throw out the babies after the first year, however they have several generations here in the yard with her.
The Corella’s nested in the trees across the road for one night. The noise lasted till three in the morning, hundreds of them. They seem to have moved on, not enough food in the area maybe?
Other than birds : The Peach trees have just finished fruiting , many rotted on the trees from the Black Parrots raiding the trees. The Plums are almost ready to pick. The Ribwort Plantain and the Comfrey are coming up every where. No bees but plenty of wasps. Not the pain in the butt ones, the ones that hunt spiders. Cabbage Moths are appearing but not bothering the vegetable patch. I can hear the odd Kookaburra in the background. The Sunsets are different everyday. I make a point of walking out the front to watch the changes every night.
Haven’t been in the best of places since my Staffy passed in November. Been doing everything out of habit more than anything else. Fighting with the court system over a dodgy van build, the NDIS National Disability Scheme which seems to be a scheme in rorting the system more than anything else, working out at the gym almost every day to try and build back up the muscle Ive lost over the last year, made a new friend with cancer that Ive been trying to motivate and its ended up hes probably been motivating me more. Started drinking beer today and trying to carve my spoon project and stopped handling knives after the third beer. As I told my new mate I haven’t given up, just don’t give a f#k anymore. Selling my car and caravan and trying to buy a Mercedes Sprinter Van and live the van life for a while. I need a sea change. I write on the blog out of habit, I go to the gym out of habit and I give grief to government departments out of habit. Then I remembered something today. A promise that I made my self. It was 8 years Dec 3rd since my last transplant The NDIS said I can apply as many times as I like till Im 60. I’m not going to live that long, I know that. The week I got Tash she would tremble under the table just from me opening a rubbish bag she had been abused that much. Her back was fused from being beaten and her leg lame from being in a rabbit trap and crippled.Couldn’t even walk 50 feet. It took years of rehab to help her. I was driving interstate to do courses and went to let her out of the car to do her business and she backed into the corner of the back seat and wouldn’t come out. She thought I was going to dump her after ten years of being with me. Today I remembered that promise. I was going to hunt that c*^t down and work his spine with a hammer that did that to her before I croak. Brings a whole new attitude to life. You-tube clips have been popping up on my phone about adopting elder Pities that have been abused. Too early yet but thinking of fostering. Seems to be something I’m good at rehabilitating abused animals. I’m better with animals than I am with people.
carving projectbeer and carving good way to spend the daysitting by the river trying to get head straightmagpie scabbing food
Malachi from rocky instincts will be running workshops at the Capricorn caves in the next couple of weeks!
The workshops are Fire making and Rope making to be held on the 11th, 12th, 18th, 19th and 20th. We have a guest presenter Adam Kavanagh from Discovery Channels Naked and Afraid running sessions on the 11th and 12th so be sure to take the chance to see him in action while he is in town.
Immerse yourself in the skills of our ancestors, get back to nature and learn new useful bush skills in this interactive display and workshop.
Rope making, fibre craft and traps sessions include:
Rope, weaving and fibrecraft display and demonstrations
Two new books off my reading list arrived. Ive been looking forward to reading these for some time.
Prologue: Men of the Last Frontier
“A deep slowing-flowing river, silent, smooth as molten glass: on either bank a forest, dark, shadowy and mysterious.” Grey Owl. The very first sentence had me hooked. I wish I could write like that.
The Eightfold Path, although referred to as steps on a path, is not meant to be a sequential learning process, but as eight aspects of life.
My brain works differently to most peoples. I see something or learn a technique such as a breathing exercise in a martial art seminar and I try applying it to everything, from walking the dog to hammering in a nail. The technique just slams me straight in the head and makes sense to me.Not only that I see the applications in other areas, not just where I learnt it or from where it was meant to be applied. Hence the Eightfold Path as applied to Bushcraft.
The Eightfold Path is the Right Understanding, Right Intent, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. The Eightfold Path can be divided into three sections. Wisdom , Conduct and Discipline!
Wisdom
The right View is to have the right concepts and ideas to enable understanding.
The right Thought is also known as the right determination, the right awareness or intention.
Conduct
The right Speech of which there are four. Words that are true and honest. Words of Compassion. These are kind and soft and give others confidence. Words of Praise that encourage others. Words of Altruism these help and benefit others, even at our own expense.
The right Action or behavior that protects life, to be compassionate and charitable.
The right livelihood is to have moral professionalism.
Discipline
The right Effort is also known as diligence that we should move in the direction of courage.
The right mindfulness has four foundations:
Breathing. Being mindful breathing in and mindful breathing out. The awareness of breath cuts through discursive thinking, pulling us back from mental meandering and anchoring the mind securely in the present.
Feeling. The word “feeling” does not refer to emotion but to the bare effective tone of experience, whether pleasant, painful, or neutral.Pleasant feeling nourishes greed or attachment, painful feeling provokes aversion, and neutral feeling sustains delusion, manifesting as apathy and complacency.Being mindful of the feelings that arise, turn them into an object of mindfulness defuses the feeling.
Contemplation. To reflect on what you have learnt. The qualities that conduce realization. The five hindrances are sensual desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and worry, and doubt not only to note the hindrances, but to discern how they arise in order to dispel them.
The right Concentration is to settle the mind and prevent being distracted, to help stay focused.
The seven factors unfold in sequence. Mindfulness initiates the contemplative process. Stable mindfulness gives rise to investigation, the probing quality of intelligence. Investigation calls forth energy, energy generates rapture, rapture leads to tranquility, tranquility to concentration, and concentration to equanimity.
So HOW does any of this apply to bushcraft ?
Four days in the bush with 15 other people, under stress, limited food, cold, wet, stress either brings out the best in people or the worst. After doing several bushcraft courses what interests me the most are peoples personalities when they are placed out of their comfort zones in situations designed to develop resilience.
My very first course I was struggling with firebows. I had driven halfway around the country in an old bus, my knees were aching, Id just gotten over the flu and half my diaphragm doesn’t work. So kneeling down trying to use a bow to develop friction wasn’t the easiest chore. I couldn’t breathe and was in pain. One of the other students I had spoken to a little saw this and without hesitation walked over and grabbed the other end of the bow and supported the bearing block along with my hand and we soon had the ember and fire glowing. I later asked why he had come over and helped? His answer! “I saw how much it meant to you.” In that moment he had changed my life. That hour, that day turned from being a challenge to being depressing, a failure then back to a success. I was later shown on another course how to use firebows standing, making it possible for me to use them all the time with my injuries.
Being able to make it through any event in your life that is out of your comfort zone comes down to attitude. There’s a great quote. “Its not about how many times you fall down. Its about how many times you get back up.”
So when your on a week long training exercise how are you remembered after-wood. As someone that puts others down, as a grump or as someone that supported others, helped when they needed it. Did it matter if you weren’t any good at spoon carving or was it more important that people respected you for not giving up and having determination.
Tomato Sauce Sandwiches 9th Jan When I was young. Very young like 6 to 8 we had neighbors two doors down. I can never remember having my father teaching me to ride a bike but I remember the elder kids at that house teaching me to ride a bike. I thought of them like brothers. They didn’t live there very long. Looking back on it the house must have been a housing commission property for people in need. I remember they raised ferrets and when ever the local kids turned up to play we had tomato sauce sandwiches for lunch. Their mother couldn’t afford much but we were always offered those sauce sandwiches. Which I’m still hooked on today and just had for lunch. I never saw a father and from memory there were two maybe three kids. They never associated with the other families, but they were my friends. This is one of my earliest memories. I don’t remember their names or barely their faces, but I remember the confidence they gave me and their mother that was probably ashamed of only being able to offer tomato sauce on bread for a meal but she offered more than any of the, what do you call them medium income families. Ive been trying to think of examples of the eight fold path. After 9 hours of writing in front of a computer the headaches start.
For some time now I have tried to form a habit of trying to watch either the sun rise or the sun set depending on the time of the year. It seems the sunsets are a little better this time of the year, where I am currently located.
I suggested to a friend last week to try and do the same. Something inside you gradually changes when you do.
I started this to keep up my discipline of rising early and to practice photography, but when I looked into it there were actual studies into the effects of taking five minutes out a day to watch to sun breach to the world.
1) Linked to lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines (proteins that cue the immune system to work harder). Moments that contribute to a feeling of awe, which research has shown has an anti-inflammatory effect in the body.
2) When sunlight stimulates the retinas in your eyes, it triggers your brain to produce serotonin.
3) Exposing yourself to early morning light helps develop a healthy circadian rhythm,
4) A theory called attention restoration theory (ART) suggests that spending time in nature, or even just looking at it, can reduce mental fatigue and boost concentration. The theory posits that the brain can only focus on a specific stimulus or task for a limited amount of time. But exposure to the natural environment promotes more effortless brain function and allows your brain to recover and restore its ability to concentrate.
5) The Spectrum of Light at Sunrise. The electromagnetic spectrum includes all the frequencies generated by the sun. In order from the highest to the lowest frequencies, we have gamma rays, xrays, ultraviolet radiation, visible light (violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red), infrared radiation, microwaves, and radio waves. While all of the sun’s radiation affects our health, deep red light at the end of the visual light spectrum is emerging as an important activator against the threat of aging.
Red light that borders the infrared spectrum has the lowest frequency (slow waves) in the visual light spectrum, while violet and blue light, which border the ultraviolet spectrum, have the highest frequency (fast waves). Because blue light has a higher frequency, it produces more energy and heat than lower-frequency red light.
During sunrise and sunset, the sun is lower in the sky and the sun’s rays penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere at an angle. Rays hitting Earth from low on the horizon scatter low-frequency blue light, while higher-frequency red light remains intact. This is why we see more red and less blue during sunrise and sunset. The blue sky we see during the day is a result of the easily scattered nature of higher-frequency blue light.
During the sunrise and sunset, ultraviolet (UV) rays, which can cause damage, are also blocked at this time, since they have higher frequencies, similar to blue light. (One study discovered that when your shadow is taller than you while you stand then you are getting the optimal exposure to red and infrared light while being protected from UV radiation.)
Whilst we only ever seem to hear about the importance of Vitamin D which is made by UVB, morning sun is actually incredibly important because it’s saturated in infrared and blue light. There is no UV light first thing in the morning – neither UVA or UVB.
“Witnessing a beautiful mountain range or a dramatic thunderstorm, there’s something magical about watching the sun rise or set. These moments help put things in perspective and remind us of the bigger picture. Even our problems seem minuscule when viewing them from a bird’s-eye view. What could be better than starting off your morning with a colorful sunrise? This practice allows you to start the day with a calm and peaceful vibe. And if you make it a daily habit, it can contribute to a regular routine
It will make you more grateful for Earth. Beauty enriches life and makes it much more rewarding. It has been proven that watching the sunrise or sunset gives you a better sense of gratitude for the earth. When you are caught up in the natural beauty of the Earth (like a sunset), you rid yourself of any distractions and feel higher levels of satisfaction and gratitude for what’s happening in front of you.
The sunset, something completely intangible, has the power to stop countless people, and remind them just how beautiful life is when you choose to see it. Make watching sunrise a sacred ritual, taking a moment of gratitude while bathing in nature.”
The above 12 paragraphs could be absolute crap for all I know. What I do know is the practice of making the effort has changed me and there is at-least 5 minutes in a day when I don’t have to think about anything else other than a beautiful piece of artwork in front of me, that is different every single day.
Colloquially, “stupid” can mean “easy.” You can also say something is “stupid hard,” meaning “extremely hard.” Discipline is Hard, All in, all the time. You have to give everything you have just to make it to the next day. Just like managing stress, you have to focus on one piece at a time. So don’t worry about the test you have in the afternoon. Your goal is to make it to breakfast. Then lunch, and so on. Whether you are building a startup, leading a team in an organization, being an parent, battling cancer, or training for a triathlon, it’s got to be all or nothing. Mediocrity and moderation won’t get the job done. Give everything you do, everything you’ve got. This is something I forgot. Well not forgot, more have put away else where for a time.. Being tired, depression and pain can do that. Pain and anger can also help you remember to bring that part of you back. Well it always has for me. Its just not kicking in as it normally has. Everytime some dumbarse doctor has told me Im terminal, Id get angry and fight harder. I guess I miss the dog. She would keep me calm and kept me centered. Nothing else would matter as long as she was taken care of. I do my 800 meters first thing in the morning, start my sets of squats, calf raises and hamstring curls, leg extensions and build them up till it feels like the knee will rip out of the socket and yet Im still not pushing myself hard enough. I can feel that Im not. 110 degree bend as of last fortnight. Not good enough. Im refusing to take the pain killers anymore. I can deal with the pain but I cant deal with the lack of concentration.
Always maintain composure Stay clear on objective Dont punish yourself Dont put yourself down Just accept it Acknowledge it Move on and continue Take a mental note to improve Always focus on success Forget failure Failures are not failures They are just lessons
Translates to Forest bathing. Shinrin-Yoku is the practice of immersing our senses in nature with the intention of enhancing well-being, or taking in the forest atmosphere.
Emerging from Japan during the 1980s alongside the Japanese art of mindfulness, emphasizing a lingering in the present moment, this restorative and engaging health practice incorporating a range of nature-based interventions, is becoming a cornerstone of preventive health care and healing
In Japan it is called shinrin-yoku (森林浴) or shinrin-roho (森林療法), in Korea it is referred to as sanlimyok (산림욕) and in China people call it senlín liáofǎ (森林療法)
To go forest bathing is simply to immerse yourself in nature, soaking up the sights, sounds, touches and smells of the great outdoors.
A new mate suggested I look into this as a way of enhancing the Bird Language and Tracking courses. I thought it looked interesting enough Id share his idea on the blog.
“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks”
