Spring is in the air, and with it is a strong desire to finish the canoe mold I’ve been working on all winter.  I was over working on it yesterday, attaching the metal bands to the mold.  The metal bands serve two roles in the canoe building process.  First, they’re the same width as the [...]

I was out the other night and snapped this photo of the crescent moon low on the western horizon. The colors were amazing, as you can see. The weather here is warming up today, so there won’t be many more nights I can walk out on the ice without going for an unplanned swim. As [...]

There’s an interesting article out today on how nuthatches pay attention to the calls of chickadees, specifically the alarm calls. The token naysayer at the end of the article has concerns that it isn’t the specific call other birds react to, but rather the intensity of whatever call is made. Read the whole article here.

I shut down the comments on the Moose Dung Gazette a while back. I realize this can be frustrating to our readers, and that comments often make a blog more readable and entertaining, but this is the second installment of the Moose Dung Gazette. The first MDG was up for several years but was hacked [...]

Lee Valley Tools is a woodworking product supplier who offers reprints of classic books. One I recently picked up is their “Chain Saw and Crosscut Saw Training Course”, a reprint of a US Forest Service publication. It’s a great complement to some of the books on axes in our bibliography. I like it because it [...]

I’ve wanted a water-cooled, slow rpm grindstone for years to touch up old axe heads I pick up at junk, antique, and used tool stores. The good ones cost way more than I’m willing to invest, and the cheap ones don’t have the water bath and they spin too quickly. But while in New Brunswick [...]

After spending another week in New Brunswick, this time running a winter bushcraft course with some of the troops from the Canadian infantry school at Gagetown, I made it home just in time for the St. Patrick’s day storm.  We got another 8 inches of snow and ice, but storms this time of year don’t [...]

I’m back from my trip to New Brunswick and had a great time. In addition to running several bushcraft and winter survival courses I was able to see a semester student from two years ago and explore the bush with my good friend Jeff Butler of Northwoods Survival, who was my host for the entire [...]