February 20th, 2007
porcupines
This post is in reply to a special request from my mom. She was looking through my online Porcupine gallery and suggested that I should write something about them. As it happens, this is a very good time of the year to be thinking about Porcupines (Erethizon dorsatum) as we’ll soon be seeing them perched atop trees wherever we go hiking. They’re very fond of the freshly budding branches of many kinds of trees, so are freqeuntly found clinging to the highest branches of tall trees as they nip off tender branchlets.
Most of the time, if you find a Porcupine in a tree, it will look more like a furry ball than an animal. Often, the head is not at all visible. However, sometimes the Porcupine will be moving around, as in the above example. If you’re lucky, you may get to see it standing up on its hind legs, clawed front and rear feet curled to better grip the branches. They’re really quite beautiful little creatures when you get a chance to see them moving about, albeit rather slowly.
In late winter, you will often find Porcupine tracks in the soft snow. As you can see in the above photo (click on all photos for larger view), the tracks have quite a distinctive undulating shape.
While you may see single sets of tracks on fresh snow, in late winter, it’s not uncommon to find what I refer to as a “porcupine highway” (see left).
The tracks usually lead from the porcupine’s den to some area where it likes to feed. We found the above tracks on one of the trails at Charleston Lake Provincial Park in mid-March 2006. They led from a den in a crack between two large rocks, to an area where the porcupine had been feeding on fresh branchlet tips on trees towering above the trail. Typical signs of Porcupine feeding activity are dropped branches found below the trees, along with scat and sometimes urine from the animals that have been feeding up above. When we’re out walking along country roads in early spring, we often find branchlets that look as though they they’ve been neatly snipped off at an angle. That’s usually the work of porcupines.
Porcupines like to den under rock ledges such as the above. Notice how there is a lot of Porcupine scat at the entrance to the den. It’s not at all unusual to find quite a mound of these droppings around and inside the mouth of the den. The pellets are elongated and oval in shape.
As you can see from the above photo, like other members of the Rodent family, Porcupines have very large incisors suited to chewing bark, cutting off twigs, and gnawing on wood.
This is a Tamarack (Larix laricina) tree that has been chewed by a Porcupine. The animal has chewed through the outer bark to get at the nutritious cambium (inner bark) of the tree. Tamarack seems to be a favourite of the Porcupine. We’ve sometimes found small trees almost entirely stripped of bark. In fact, here’s another view of the same tree showing how it has been debarked from bottom to top.
My family have a bit of a history of spending time out in the woods at their cottages. Just about everyone seems to have a story about Porcupines chewing up something made of wood or leather — things like porch railings, or handles off of tools — anything that would have been held in the hand. The theory is that they are attracted to salt residue on these objects.
For more information on Porcupines, check out this excellent page on the Canadian Wildlife Services Hinterland Who’s Who website.
Tags: Porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum