Sure, it’s fall and the hunting crowd is spending a lot of time roaming the woods and fields in search of game, and you never know what you might encounter. Sometimes, however, we have wildlife encounters even when not in hunting situations. Case in point, a couple of weeks ago, I went out to my backyard to burn some paper in our burn barrel, and a movement caught my eye under an old piece of farm equipment parked out back. I was easily able to capture a number of photographs of the spiny critter commonly known as a porcupine. Fortunately, my encounter was at a safe distance, and the porcupine eventually slowly wandered off into the nearby woods.
On relatively rare occasions, like many other hunters, I’ll occasionally spot a porcupine walking through the woods or sometimes high up in a tree. It’s also not unusual to see one dead along the road. Spotting a porcupine in your backyard is probably less common since, like a lot of our wildlife, the porcupine tends to be more nocturnal. Porcupines also tend to favor areas of extensive forests like the rugged mountains of northcentral Pennsylvania and the timberland in the northwest and northeast corners of the state. Few porcupines inhabit the southern part of the state.
Of course, we are all aware of what makes a porcupine such an interesting creature to run across, and that is the sharp, pointed quills that protrude from much of its body and tail. The quills are 1-4 inches long, with the largest ones located on the back of the animal. A porky may have up to 30,000 of those yellow or white tipped sharp pointed quills. When a porcupine is relaxed, the quills lie smoothly along the body, but when it’s threatened, the muscle contractions cause the shafts of the quills to rise. Contrary to what some people may think, porcupines cannot “fire or launch” the quills, but rather, because the quills are loosely attached, they are easily dislodged on contact and stick in the victim’s flesh. What’s even more interesting is that each quill has a needle-shaped tip covered with hundreds of minute, overlapping diamond-shaped scales, and the scales slant backwards, acting as barbs. When a quill lodges in a victim, the victim’s muscle fibers engage the tips of the scales and further draw the quill inward.
A number of years ago, I had the unfortunate experience of helping to remove a mouthful of quills from my son’s dog. As many of us know, dogs have to find out the hard way what happens when you try to grab a porcupine. It was a painful experience for the dog as well as those of us who were yanking the quills out with a pair of pliers.
Porcupines are not hibernators, but they do hold up in caves, rock crevices, hollow logs and trees, brush piles, and abandoned buildings. Porcupines are vegetarians, eating needles, twigs, and small limbs of evergreens. Porcupines also crave salt, so it shouldn’t surprise you that when you left your ax stuck in a hunk of wood outback, the handle was half chewed away. Hopefully, your next porcupine encounter will be at a safe distance.
