Something no one has seemed to mention is in broadleaf woodland you will find wind blown twigs and branches caught up in the branches of trees. These are air dried and even in very heavy rain will only be damp on the outside, they will still snap with a nice sharp snap.

There is often loads of this material available in many thicknesses providing kindling, tinder and fuel. Whilst in Guyana I lit and kept my fire fuelled for the whole time I was in the jungle using this windblown deadfall and it was during the wet season.

Squirrel nests.
http://www.ofnc.ca/fletcher/our_animals/squirrels/Red-Squirrel-nest.jpg

They are usually a blend of grass and leaves. The red squirrels try to use more grass, grey squirrels like to use more leaves.
They are usually too high to reach, but not always.
If you can reach one it is a pile of dry leaves or grass that will fill a wheel barrow and there is a nest of finer fiber in the middle.
Red squirrels seem to like building in spruce trees more than the grey squirrels which seem to like nesting in maples and oaks more.

Do the squirrels also stash nuts on their nests?

No. They normally don't even take food into the nests to eat.
If you look around where squirrels are there are places where they take food to eat it.
They leave large piles of the shells or the cones, all taken apart.
Squirrel stashes are usually in holes, hidden under something or distributed in small caches around their territory. I wish they were easy to find but I have only ever found them by accident or by watching the squirrels making them.
Some squirrel stashes are strange. I saw a spruce tree once with all the branches between 12 and 16 feet above the ground with mushrooms on them. They got into one of my storage sheds once and filled a plastic pipe that was stored up in the rafters with maple keys. The squirrel had stripped the wing and husk off them so it looked like it was full of green peas. They do the same thing in hollow logs or holes in tree trunks.

Back to tinder sources?

Sorry to hijack my own thread; couldn't resist asking.

Does animal hair work as tinder the way human hair is supposed to?

Edit: would put an interesting twist on hunting for tinder!

I believe Richard Pryor and Micheal Jackson did, but with bad endings....

So cruel, So funny, So true.

Hair, wool, fur. toenail clippings are all the same stuff and are generally considered as flame resistant.
With proteins like these the heat to ignite them is high and the heat released by burning them is low. They also form a foamy burned crust as they burn and it insulates them from burning more.
You can burn hair with a flame from something else but usually as soon as the external heat it taken away the hair self extinguished.

You can singe the hair and eyebrows off you face easily enough, but to get hair to really burn you need it full of styling gel like M. Jackson's was or stuff from freebasing coke like Pryor's was.

If anybody has actually used hair, fur, wool or leather as tinder I really would like to hear from them about the conditions and how they got it to burn.

It has come to my attention the hair/fur from a German Shepherd, mixed with lint, burns like crazy but stinks like... well, burning hair.

All our dryer lint is mixed with German Shedder hair due to having two of them, plus a Husky.

Lint is the tinder of last resort around here. It does motivate one to get the fire going, just to kill the burning hair smell.

I assume the lint the hair is mixed with is from cotton clothes.
Clothing lint is something else I find iffy. If the clothes were synthetic or woollens I have had trouble trying to light it but cotton lint takes a spark well.

One tinder nobody mentioned is cedar punk.
Sometimes you find cedar logs or stumps which have had dry rot.
If you break them open you might find dry but half decayed wood. It is very light and porous, it tends to break into cubes. It will catch a spark and smolder. It burns as an ember really nice but does not flame well.
Because it is inside the log it is usually still dry when it rains.