Paul Hetzler
The Advocate
One of our native residents has an adorable face, makes welcome mats out of their own poop, openly carries weapons and plows snow all winter. If you snowshoe or cross-country ski, there’s a good chance you’ll come across its furrows. Often, these trails will dead-end at a large tree, and if you look up, you might actually see the rascal itself, a ball of fur and quills sleeping among the branches.
One of 29 species worldwide, the North American porcupine is found throughout nearly all of Canada. Growing to 50 centimetres long and weighing as much as 15 kilograms, it’s the second-largest North American rodent behind the beaver. It’s the only cold-hardy porcupine in the world, and one of the few that regularly climb trees.
Their name derives from the Latin for “quill pig,” but my Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) friends call them anêntaks, literally, “bark eaters.” Reportedly, this is a less-than-endearing term they applied ages ago to their Algonquin neighbours, with whom they once shared hunting grounds in what is now northern New York State.
The Kanien’kehá:ka, like all six member nations in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, have a long history as agronomists. The Algonquins, who were mainly hunter-gatherers at the time, wisely knew that the inner bark of pine, maple, elm and other trees is nutritious. This is, in fact, how the Adirondack (anêntaks) Mountains got their name.
Active all winter
These rodents of unusual size are active all winter, which is a great time to track them. More or less bullet-shaped, they make effective plows, and after a new snowfall, you can see which troughs have been recently cleared. Though not strictly nocturnal, porkies do tend to be more active at night.
Like me and a few others, porcupines talk to themselves. For the most part, they “speak” softly. If you like to camp, you may have heard one of these animals “muttering” as it passed near your tent in the dark. Vocalizations range from grunts and mewls to low whines, and even what sounds like the caw of a bird.
A porcupine’s feet are pebbly textured and furless, and in deep snow you can also see marks where the tail drags side to side as it waddles. In cases where the claws don’t register, its footprint can look strangely like that of a small child. Because porcupine fur includes roughly 30,000 hollow quills that collectively act like a personal flotation device, they swim well, and dine on all sorts of aquatic vegetation in season.
Quills not launched
Their quills, which are really modified hairs, also account for the porky’s ho-hum attitude toward humans, dogs and, unfortunately, cars. Quills, of course, aren’t missiles, and can’t be launched at predators. But they do come off at the literal drop of a hat, provided you drop said hat on a porcupine. A quill’s barbed end sticks amazingly well to skin and other things, and if not removed right away, can work its way through soft tissues like muscles and organs.
Quills are used the world over by indigenous peoples for embroidering. Usually cream-coloured at the base, transitioning to brown or black at the tips, quills have an innate beauty, but are often dyed before being worked into leather or textiles. In North America, native peoples reportedly threw a blanket or skin over a porcupine to harvest some of its quills. I’ve never messed with a live specimen, but have harvested quills from road-killed porkies by touching a leather glove to them. The quills take some effort to remove from leather, and I store them in small glass jars for later use in beadwork.
Not invincible
Generally, quills lie flat until a predator comes on the scene, at which time a porky will raise them and keep its back to the threat. Lashing its 20- to 25-cm-long tail side to side, the porcupine tries to make a protective radius around itself. Fishers, fierce predators and one of the largest members of the weasel family, are quick enough to outflank a porcupine and kill it by attacking the head.
One winter, I tracked a pair of fishers across a frozen pond to some rock ledges where I knew porkies denned. There, I found fisher and porcupine tracks in the blood-stained snow, a scene that spoke of a porky’s demise. Great horned owls, coyotes and wolves are said to hunt porcupines as well.
Having a cute face only gets you so far in life, and porcupines are despised by many folks because bark-eating harms and even kills trees. Since porkies are attracted to salt, they’ll chew on tool handles and other items used by people.
In addition to eating bark of all kinds, they have a particular weakness for apples. It’s impressive how far out on a branch a porcupine will go to get one, seeming to defy gravity. Unfortunately, this resulted in some of my apple trees getting pruned a bit more than I would have liked over the years.
Porkies usually den in rock crevices, caves and sometimes in hollow trees, the entrance often carpeted in a deep layer of crap that gets pushed out into an alluvial formation. Some biologists think this is to deter predators, but it does not smell bad.
Long life
Breeding is in October and December. In May and June, females may birth up to four young, but typically just one. Not only do porcupines have a low birth rate, it takes more than two years for them to fully mature. In the wild, a porcupine may live 17 or 18 years, with the oldest on record being an ancient 28 years.
Ray Fadden, a former neighbour of mine, used to teach school at Akwesasne, where a pupil once handed him an orphan porcupine. He said it was easily house-trained and made a great pet, and showed me pictures of “Needles,” a full-size porky, in his lap. Apparently, he tried to release it into the wild, but after few days it found its way back home, where it bypassed my neighbour’s outstretched arms and made a beeline for the litter box to hurriedly deposit several days’ worth of pent-up feces. It seemed that Needles knew how to eat in the wild, but not how to relieve itself.
Kids and adults love to watch porcupines, as they’re one of the few wild animals that will stand for such ogling. Just hang onto your dog if you have one!
