Bushcraft, also known as wilderness skills, is the art of living in harmony with nature. Survival is a more extreme short term version where you need to use bushcraft skills to get yourself out of a dangerous situation. Bushcraft is knowing about survival and thriving in the natural environment.
Bushcraft and Survival courses teach skills including knowing about firelighting, tracking, hunting, building shelters, using knives and axes, foraging and recognising edible wild plants. Navigation and finding your way also are of great importance to your survival.
An ideal place to find out about survival skills is in Bushcraft Magazine. Bushcraft Magazine is packed with bushcraft and survival skills. There are ‘how to’ articles on subjects as how to make your own survival kit or how to do woodcraft and camping.
An excellent online resource is Bushcraft UK. Bushcraft UK has a huge set of downloads including the US Army Survival Manual, Nature Observation & Tracking and Aids to Survival – Western Australia.
Bushcraft and Survival Skills Schools
If you want to experience bushcraft, then there are plenty of organisations that provide survival courses. Bushcraft UK has a list of bushcraft and survival schools under its resource links.
Here are a few bushcraft and survival schools:
- Barking Mad Survival School – Brecon Beacons Wales
- Bison Bushcraft – East Sussex
- Breakaway Survival School – Wales
- Bushbasics – Surrey
- Bushcraft Ventures – Scotland
- Cambrian School of Survival – West Wales
- Dryad BushCraft – Swansea, South Wales
- Footsteps of Discovery – Cornwall
- Forest Knights – Sussex
- Greenman Bushcraft – Essex
- Hatt Adventures – The Peak District, Wales, Devon and Cornwall
- Native Awareness – Leicestershire
- Natural Lore – Cambridgeshire/Suffolk
- Natural Pathways – Kent
- Nomad Bushcraft – Wiltshire
- Oakhill Adventure and Survival School – Dorset
- ProAdventure – Llangollen, North Wales
- Sussex Adventures – Sussex
- Tamarack – Lancashire
- Tracks4life – Somerset/Exmoor
- UK Survival School – Wales
- Wholeland – Devon
- Wildcrafts Bushcraft And Survival School
- Wild Live – Northern Ireland
- Wildlore Wilderness School – Sussex
- WildPath – North Devon coast
- Wildside Survival – West Sussex
- Wild Wise – Devon
- Wildwood Bushcraft – Sussex
- Woodcraft School – West Sussex
- Woodland Survival Crafts – Derbyshire/Leicestershire
If you are in the USA, then perhaps the Wilderness Survival Website can provide information. CBS’s Survivor has become one of the most watched television shows in America. One of the reasons for this show’s success is that there is an adventurer in all of us and since we all cannot be in a survival situation we like to live vicariously through the people on the show.
If you think you know everything about survival, try Sergeant Safari’s Wilderness Quiz.