For your chance to win four places for you and your kids on our new Family Wildlife Walkabout course in 2012, plus £1,000 spending money, take a look at this very special competition being run by ITV Wild:

For your chance to win an exclusive one-day Bushcraft course in the UK led by Ray Mears himself, please enter the following competition with 5.11 Tactical:

Woodlore instructor Dan Hume on our Arctic Experience expedition

For the dedicated Woodloreans out there who have been following our blog since its inception last year, you may remember that last summer we asked all of you for your thoughts on how we could improve our blog.

One of the ideas put forward was for an ‘Ask a Woodlore Instructor’ post, whereby we would take questions submitted by you and put them to one of our instructors. Well, it may have taken us a year to get round to it, but here we are!

Dan Hume, one of Woodlore’s Fundamental Instructors, has very kindly offered himself up as our first interviewee, and will be answering a selection of your questions on topics chosen by you.

During his career at Woodlore, Dan has led our Fundamental Bushcraft, Woodsense and Intermediate Bushcraft courses, as well as assisting on our Applied Bushcraft course and Arctic Experience expeditions. Later this year, he will be leading our Wilderness Navigation and Journeyman courses for the very first time.

If you’d like to get involved, all you need to do is post your question as a comment below (we’ll keep all of the comments hidden before picking the best ones to put forward to Dan).

The person who submits the best question, as chosen by Dan himself, will win a £10.00 Woodlore Voucher.

This has the makings of a really interesting article, so we’re excited (and maybe a little worried) to see what sort of questions we get!

ENTRIES ARE NOW CLOSED

After receiving numerous enquiries from our customers, we recently started stocking the waterproof hunting cap which Ray wore in his Northern Wilderness series:

The Seeland Keeper Hunting Cap is a breathable, fleece-lined peaked hat designed specifically for hunting and stalking, and we’re giving one away.

The Seeland Keeper Peaked Hunting Cap

To win one of these hats, all you have to do is answer the following question:

From our Online Shop, what is Ray’s favourite item of clothing, which he often wears when stalking?

The first person to comment with the correct answer will win a Seeland Keeper Cap in the size of their choice.

Good luck!

UPDATE: Congratulations to Ciaran Rooney! Ciaran was the first to comment with the correct answer, which is indeed the Swazi/Ray Mears Tahr Gore-Tex Anorak. A Seeland Keeper Cap is on it’s way to you. Thanks to everyone else for all your entries as well.

At the beginning of 2011, Ray gave two talks at the ExCel Centre in London as part of The Outdoors Show. To coincide with this appearance, the Ordnance Survey group produced a limited run of Ray Mears Explorer Maps, covering an area of Britain of Ray’s choosing.

Ray chose the New Forest, a favourite area of his, and one which he visited as part of his latest Wild Britain series.

Limited-edition Ray Mears OS Explorer Map - The New Forest

Nearly all of these maps were given away to attendees of The Outdoors Show; however, we were able to get our hands on the last three! If you’d like to get hold of one of these maps, we’ll be giving them away with the next three purchases of the Silva Expedition 15TDCL Compass.

If you’d like to take us up on this offer, what you’ll need to do is e-mail us with your name and address. If you are one of the first three people to get in touch, we will reply with a confirmation to say that you can now go ahead and place your compass order, and your free map will simply be included in your parcel.

Update: Congratulations to Dave, Simon and Mark, who got in there first and nabbed the three remaining maps.

During the second half of summer back in 2010, Woodlore Field Staff member Sarah Day took some fantastic photos of a butterfly that she had spotted. The first person who can correctly identify the species will win a £10.00 Woodlore Voucher, which can be used against any items of kit in our Online Shop or against a Bushcraft Course of your choice. Good luck!

The butterfly, correctly identified as a Male Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus)

The butterfly, correctly identified as a Male Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus)

Well done to Jerome, who was the first to correctly identify this butterfly as a Male Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus). A £10.00 Woodlore Voucher is on its way to you!

As with our last competition, the picture below shows an animal track which was photographed by Woodlore office member Steve, on a trip to East Africa. As always, the first person to correctly identify it wins a £10.00 Woodlore Voucher - good luck!

The animal print found in East Africa, correctly identified as that of a baboon

It seems like this print threw a lot of you, and some of us as well! However, it was correctly identified by Jamie as the print of a baboon – well done Jamie.

If you’d like to brush up on your skills at tracking and identifying wildlife, we recommend taking part in the Woodsense Tracking & Nature Awareness course, or, alternatively, taking a look at the Animal Tracks & Signs book.

The below picture, taken by Woodlore office member Steve on a trip to East Africa earlier this year, shows an animal print found in the dirt. The first person to find and correctly identify it wins, as always, a £10.00 Woodlore Voucher:

The animal print found in Eastern Africa, correctly identified as that of a hyena

Due to the angle at which the photograph was taken, this wasn’t the easiest print to identify. However, some of you got it right – it is in fact a hyena print; Steve and the group were even lucky enough to see one that day sprinting past them. Of all the comments, Zoe was the first to answer correctly, winning a £10.00 Woodlore Voucher.

If you’d like to brush up on your skills at tracking and identifying wildlife, we’d recommend taking a look at the Animal Tracks & Signs book or, even better, taking part in our Woodsense Tracking & Nature Awareness course.

This moth was spotted resting on a pair of boots on one of our Fundamental Bushcraft courses earlier this month. Can anyone identify it?

The first person to leave a comment with the correct answer will win a £10.00 Woodlore Voucher.

The moth, correctly identified as the Black Arches (Lymantria monacha)

 As many of you have pointed out, this moth is in fact the Black Arches moth (Lymantria monacha). Siegfried was the first to answer correctly, winning a £10.00 voucher, but well done to everyone who got it right.

Woodlore office member Harvey spotted this highly poisonous fungus on his recent Introduction to Bushcraft course. Is anyone able to identify it? The first correct answer wins a £10.00 Woodlore Voucher. Correctly identified by J. Deval.

Poisonous fungus found on our Intro course, identified as the Panther Cap (Amanita pantherina)

Field Staff member Ian Lawson (who led Harvey’s Introduction course and originally identified the Panther Cap shown above) has passed a photo onto us of a Fly Agaric which he found last year. Ian felt this would be useful to see as a handful of the comments we received had mentioned this species:

Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria)