I saw my first live porcupine a few weeks ago. I’ve seen dead porcupines before, but I just recently learned how to find a live one.
See? You look for the little fronds of pine needles littering the ground under the tree. Someone is eating up there!
Since the porcupine is the same color as the tree bark, he just looks like a lump on the tree. I couldn’t get a nice picture of him, but we know that he’s there because of his piles of needles.
According to Wikipedia, porcupines eat different foods in different regions, and in this region they stay up in a pine tree all winter, eating the cambium layer under the bark, and the needles. Sounds like a beaver, I thought, and sure enough the porcupine is the second largest rodent in North America (the beaver is #1).
Porcupines stunt pine trees by girdling them high above ground, and in the last century the US Forest Service used strychnine to clear them from public forestland; widespread eradication efforts have only recently stopped.
A porcupine can live up to 18 years in the wild, and the poor girls are pregnant for 7 months at a stretch. If we were pregnant as long as porcupines were, we’d be carrying babies for 28 months. Like us, they only have one at a time, and it’s called a porcupette!!! I couldn’t get a shot of a porcupine, but here’s someone else’s photo of a mom and her porcupette.
Is that a sweet little prickly thing, or what?
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