Bushcraft Foraging: Piptoporus Betulinus

Description

A quick look at some of the health benefits of a very common bracket fungi, Piptoporus Betulinus.

Always seek expert advice with regards to natural medicals.

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Tags: woodland,forest,mountains,river,lake,tinder,Survival,Bushcraft,survivor,knife,knives,valley,axe,camping,tent,footwear,hunting,fishing,backpack,clothing,boots,primitive,nature,shelter,shooting,shotgun,rifle,rucksack,flashlight,torch,craft,plants,trees,education,wilderness,wood,family,hobbies,fun,animals,game,Piptoporus Betulinus (Organism Classification)

Video Transcription

hi there guys Mike from MC ki bushcraft here and welcome to another video I've been on a bit of a day hike today and I've come into a part of this woodland here which is really what we would call secondary growth woodland you can see it's really young but mainly we've got a lot of silver birch betula pangaean er which is a very common type of birch it grows here in the British Isles and I have one in front of him here that's dead and it's been dads for a long time the bark is starting to crack and a lot of the oil is disappearing from the bark and that's really a good sign that you can tell how old this actually is but growing on it is a type of bracket fungi when you can see it's just maturing very slightly and this particular fungi picked a poor especial Ennis or birch Polly Paul will emerge quite commonly at this time of year although it does emerge at other times of the year it's just at this time of year it's fairly frequent and from an identification perspective it's a good time to idea when it's like this the top is quite brown and cracked and scaly look like a kind of tea stain color and the underneath will be porous and spongy and when it's young like that it won't have opened up yet but when it gets older a emerge into huge flat plates and the underside the paws become very spacious and eventually harden off and they're brittle and yellow you know it can actually be used as a pumice stone when it's like that to clean the skin I've picked on just here on my walk in and this one's just reaching maturity it'll start to really open up these balls will expand and it almost be holes everywhere that you can see with the naked eye very easily but there's actually a gelatinous layer underneath here and when you catch the fungus at this age it is fantastic as a field dressing straight off of the tree there's been a lot of case studies on this fungi and some of it derived from oxy the IceMen remember oxy he was a man they found it was about six thousand years old almost perfectly preserved in ice he really did change a lot of things that they sort of accounted for back then in history yeah barracks and the sort of aero technology he had and all the bits of equipment he had all in it are really fascinating but he carried this funghi here picked a porous petrol in us and there was some speculation on what he used it for one of the things they say he used it for was to make fire and if you drive this funghi out like a lot of Brackett funghi it will burn and smolder and then that smoldering piece can be cut off put in a nest and blown into flame to save you having to do friction fire or iron varieties and shirts or Flint when you got to your next stop which can be quite time-consuming or use a lot of calories out of the body but another reason why they say he may have used it was for actual tea a bit like an antibiotic not in the same way that we know antibiotics but to boost the immune system it has a number of different effects and through studies that they've done they still don't know everything about this particular funghi but it has very good antibacterial effects it works very well as an anti-inflammatory it has some effects against viruses making it antiviral and it's also very good for clearing parasites out of the intestine and soothing the stomach and the intestine and relaxing you and a lot of people all over the world uses his teas you can cut a piece off and you can simmer it I wouldn't recommend boiling it but simmering it very slowly a bit like Chagga fungus over a long period of time and all the juices come out of it and you can drink it like a tea and help boost your immune system fight infection and a lot of these properties that it has

are used by people almost all over the world who um who have actually some people have started cultivating it because of its medicinal properties but there are still many things we don't know about it and a lot of funghi around here that we we don't know a lot about but it's incredible to think that what may come of things like this in the future but as a topical remedy you can capitalize on it being an antibacterial anti-inflammatory an antiviral as a sort of topical remedy and actually use this as a field dressing and it can be used in many many different ways and I'll show you how to use it and at this stage in its life it's very usable as a field dressing

right off the tree and can be used like a plaster or a band-aid which I'll show you now so you can see this one is very young but it's really a breaking point but this will make quite a nice plaster or band-aid as as you may call it we just take our knife and run it down here like that and then just like that go across and across what we can start to do is peel away that layer and you can see it coming off here and it will peel off just like that and I can see that this one is really at a point in its life where it is at breaking point because some of the material is coming away the younger they are the easier this material will break away but when we get to here what we do is we slice underneath a dressing like that when we begin to peel away some of that material there as well and try to get some of the actual material of the fungus away with the actual dressing a bit like that but you can do it a lot neater than that but I won't do it again and what you can actually do now is this part here with its medicinal properties and also the absorbent side of it can be put on a wound like so and then the actual gelatinous layer will wrap around like this and it'll stick to itself it's very sticky and there we go we have a field dressing or a band-aid or a plaster that we can use straight off the tree and reports of using this and I've used it quite a lot it'll clean the wound amazingly you'll have no inflammation and even areas where people have had deep cuts reports have said that there's very little scarring afterwards and it does a fantastic job of cleaning the wound and that will constrict overtime eventually it will go hard and then it can be broken off and these can remain on your finger for a very long time even when you put your hand in your pocket repeatedly to get something out of it once this has dried and shrunk a bit it's a fantastic field dressing so we're left with a very large block of fungi after that we still have more material we could use for band-aids or plasters straight off of this bracket just here but really at this point it will begin to dry they do take a a bit of time to dry and you can actually dry them beside a fire very very easy like you can a lot of funghi it's very porous and it can dry and dehydrate and at that point it's actually very easy to use as dressing as well but it it can be used in a very different way and this is we're approaching the fungus at different stages of its life really affect how you use it as field dressing for example this one can be straight off of the tree because it's still very young it's still got that layer forming just their necks as a plaster almost like a like a sticky layer so it can be wrapped around and used like that and that's fantastic but it won't always be like that in actual fact it'll only be like that for a very very short period of time and and then it will start to mature and harden off and that layer that we've just peeled off will probably be about that thick it gets very very thick and you can't you can't peel it off very easily it's not quite the same but it still can be used it just needs to now be hold on there by some kind of dressing like a plaster I've actually got some in my bag here that's a bit drier what I used a few days ago when I was out on a walk in the forest of bean and I cut myself and found one of these on a tree and it was it was brilliant but what we can actually do is take a segment of it like that and and then take another segment just like that and now that can actually be used on a wing so when this dries you could keep it in your backpack and if you were walking through the wilderness or traveling for a great length of time this would be your dressing you just have a big lump of this and it dries a lot

like modeling foam and when you cut into it it's like you're cutting through the hardest polystyrene you've ever you've ever felt in your life it it's really quite bizarre so this can now be placed on a wound like that that's shaving we just took off the bracket the same qualities as the rest of the funghi and it's still marginally sticky you can see there it's holding on pretty good but because it's so thick it's going to start to move away and as this fungus dries that'll just be a flat sheet so what you actually need to do is just aid it by having something else holding it on so maybe you could use some plant fibers or a bit of tape that you carried in your backpack like gorilla tape or duct tape or even some string and hold it on there and that would act as a very good dressing but that's where you can make huge sheets and pads of dressing and actually address larger wounds with it and in combination with things like suture strips you can turn these into very very effective field dressing I expect like a lot of natural medicinals it's not about just taking it once and it working immediately in the modern world we're really used to taking a pill and it affecting the area that it's supposed to just like that with a flick of a finger and we expect everything happen fast curing through natural medicines can take a very long time and it needs to be something that's included in your lifestyle rather than just taken once or twice so for example if you've replaced your normal tea with this every day you'd probably feel an enormous difference in your life and over ten or twelve years of actually taking it you have an incredibly strong immune system and probably have dodged many kind of issues that you may have had if you lived an unhealthy lifestyle but this fungus can also be used as another thing as well and that's a strop when it's dry it's not only good as field dressing it's an incredibly absorbent material very absorbent if you ever dry some and you dip it into water it'll just suck the water straight up and that's the nature of fungi is very absorbent like that and it's to be expected but if you make a flat sheet of it and mount it on a board it can be used to strop a knife back to shaving sharp is a little bit like a very fine suede material on a plate so it has so many different uses but really the main value of it is as a medicinal I hope you've enjoyed this video and found it useful thank you for watching and I'll see you very soon in another one take care guys and thanks again