Sooner or later, if you visit the woods often enough, you will encounter one of the laziest animals in the forest. I’m speaking, of course, of the porcupine, whose common name comes from the Latin porcus, meaning pig, and spina, meaning thorns, which refer to its 30,000 barbed quills, its chief defense against predators, allowing it to become slow and lazy. And, yes, it comes with an attitude that seems to say, “No way. Go ahead and make my day!” Or, “Don’t even THINK about it!”
My faithful lab, who was intelligent enough to react to hand and whistle signals given from a duck blind in the marsh while recovering downed ducks, and who, no matter how often he got slapped with that thrashing tail resulting in a snout full of barbs, never learned NOT to go after “Porky!”
Actually, those quills are not really barbs. Instead, they have fish-like scales pointing backwards. This quality causes the quills to work forward in a victim’s flesh, making the quills both painful and difficult to remove. By the way, there is no truth to the story that cutting the end of a quill will cause it to deflate and allow it to be removed more easily. I tried this only once. It was difficult to do, the attempt being painful to the dog, and it only shortened the quill, making it harder to grasp with the pliers. I have since learned that a quill, while hollow, isn’t filled with air like a balloon but, rather, contains a spongy substance, so this procedure had no merit.
In my early Boy Scout days, we were taught never to kill a porcupine. The wisdom of that day being if a woods traveler was lost and starving, that the slow porcupine could easily be killed by a blow to the nose, providing a survival meal. It wasn’t too many years later, however, that such a piece of woods lore became questionable. With no other effective predator except the fisher, whose numbers were decreasing due to habitat loss and unregulated over-trapping, the porcupine multiplied in such numbers that it became a destructive nuisance. There was not only a recurring problem of overpopulation, but also one’s dog was more often subject to painful misadventures, resulting in aborted hiking trips and extensive quill removal sessions, sometimes so involved that costly out-of-town trips to obtain the expertise of the vet (usually involving sedation) were required.
Doug Crary, who kept a boat hidden on Center Pond, would put his oars in lengths of stove pipe suspended from trees. Axe handles, outhouse seats, boots radiator hoses, brake linings, canoe paddles were all vulnerable to being chewed if left unprotected. Also, and to some land owners especially, the most harmful problem was the Porky’s appetite for the inner bark of trees, which would cause severe injury to the tree. Or if the chewing completely girdled the trunk, it could actually kill the tree. (See photo.)
As the porcupine’s numbers and damage increased to tolerable levels, various methods of controlling them were devised. Bounties were tried – 50 cents to a dollar for a porcupine ear. As with most bounties, this effort to control overpopulation was a failure. In the early 1960s, some foresters experimented with lacing apples with sodium arsenite and rolling them into porcupine dens, where other species couldn’t get them. This proved more effective than bounties, but it was costly in terms of manpower. Nature finally provided the solution: the fisher suddenly made a dramatic comeback, and in a short time had reduced the Porky’s numbers to a more tolerable level. Today, the porcupine is in balance with its habitat and is far less the destructive terror it once was when it was common to shoot the S.O.B. on sight.
Porcupines mate in the fall (carefully, it is said in jest). The female gives birth to one baby. It is born with its eyes open and is fully furred and quilled. The quills harden in about an hour, whereas little Porky, called a porcupette, is fully armed and dangerous.
In cold weather and deep snow, porcupines den up, but usually only for a few days. If you are in an area where there are a lot of Porkies, the den may be communal. As many as 15 in one den have been reported. In areas of low population, one porcupine may occupy a den. These are usually in a hollow tree, beneath the roots of a tree or in caves among jumbled rocks. The dens are easy to locate in winter because of their easily recognized ditch, or trough, where they leave their wide body trail through the snow. The dens are usually filthy and deeply littered with scat droppings, a disgusting situation if you think about it. I once found a den in hunting season and climbed up on the rocks forming the den, figuring the smell from droppings would mask my human scent. In no time, the stench was so overwhelmingly nauseating that I had to leave.
One hunting season, I returned to my wall tent after several days’ absence to find a Porky on my cot. He had been chewing on a supply box made of plywood, and the tent floor and cot were covered with fibrous-like droppings, which this time, fortunately, had a pungent, woody, resinous smell – not at all unpleasant and easy to sweep up.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had too many problems with this overgrown rodent to like him. He is slow, clumsy, dimwitted, ugly and destructive. Still I would miss his tracks in the snow or seeing him 30 feet up in a tree, munching his woody diet on a branch hardly thick enough to hold a sparrow. You have to admit that, despite all odds, he has been a survivor in the evolutionary scheme of things.