Wilderness Survival

This morning, False Cape State Park had a three hour "Wilderness Survival" program. Of course, in three hours you can't cover much, so the guide concentrated on water, food, and poisonous snakes.
Water was pretty straightforward, since around here you can get it from rain, river, bay, or marsh, all you have to do is filter or distill it. You can also get it from eating plants; in addition, one trick I hadn't heard before is that you can put a plastic bag over the end of a leafy tree branch--maple is best--and the transpiration from the leaves will collect in the bag.
Food isn't always obvious, but it's there. Blackberries were easy enough to find, and we also had cattail roots (taste like cucumber), a bitter succulent herb near the cattails, hibiscus petals, and greenbriar. Additional food sources would include acorns, grapes, yaupon holly (for tea), wild pigs (we saw where they'd been rooting up cattails), deer, clams, frogs, turtles, and so forth.
And for snakes, there was a cottonmouth coiled up in the road we were driving on. He didn't deign to move aside, so we stopped, leaned out and got pictures. I'm told you can eat them too, but they taste fishy and that rattlesnakes taste better.