Winter in the Woods: A Porcupine’s Story
In the mushroom woods as the hour of the winter solstice approaches, the arc of the sun just above the southern horizon and dipping below the trees close to the southwest compass bearing. Its narrowest angle from dawn to dusk, fewest hours of direct rays, and lowest aspect in the sky in sharp contrast to midsummer. Snow here has come and gone and come and gone again. This day, a fresh snowfall of an inch is the blank slate upon which the comings and goings of woodland creatures are revealed.
A set of tracks meandering from one tree to another stops me, familiar, but not one I have seen for a year or more. Each shallow depression is the shape of a small oblong snowshoe. More careful inspection indicates two tracks in each, one on top of the other, the larger imprint a back foot with five toes and a smaller front print with four toes. The orientation of each footfall is slightly inward like a person walking pigeon-toed. Porcupine. Bark eater.
Even without the snow, I would have concluded the presence of the old quill pig, for at the bottom of each tree visited are the spoils of its industry, a small pile of chips and bark. Looking up, large portions of the tree trunk and branches are devoid of protective bark. Backtracking before I follow the path of its destruction leads me to a large maple near the lake edge but no further. It either spent a night or two here or found its way here before last night’s snow.
Back on its trail the tracks are tell-all. It came down the mighty maple after chewing off several square feet of bark and moved to a smaller maple to do the same, but not until it paused at the trunks of several other trees first before moving on to its tree of choice. I know not if porcupines choose trees by shape, size, pattern of bark, or smell, but they know what they want to eat and in this season it is the bark of maples.
It prefers the slender twigs and leaf buds of trees and fruits and berries in the growing season, but in winter has to survive on less nutritious and less easily digestible bark. Like a bear or deer, it fattens up during summer and mostly lives off it all winter, but with at least the comfort of a full belly.
Had it continued down the shoreline and to the other side of the bay, it would have found a clump of young and old hemlocks, a preferred winter food for both bark and needles, and a greater number of young white pines that also are to its fancy. But it was here in this forest of majestic and old bigtooth aspen with scattered oaks and maples and the occasional large white pine so maple was its preference.
Its trail of foraging meandered through the woods and stopped near the highway. A few days later, I investigated the patch of woods that makes up the shoreline for part of the bigger piece of the lake. Like in the mushroom woods, there, tracks on the ground and bare trunks and stems on several dozen maple trees.
I scanned the canopy looking for the culprit but found none. I assume the bark eater was a female who might call these woods her home as part of a territory covering a couple of dozen acres. If, not a male who might wander over an area ten times that size and now following a pheromone trail in hopes of finding a mate whose fertility and receptiveness to mating lasts less than a day.
Most of us experience a porcupine only as road kill or its quills lodged in the mouth of an unfortunate dog. I have seen them from the deserts of northern Mexico to the Northwoods of Minnesota and Maine, mostly on logging trails or dirt roads where they amble slowly along.
Damage to a stand of trees can be significant, but porcupine numbers are low across the landscape, many more acres without damage than those suffering its chisel-like incisors. And its effects are not detrimental in the big picture. Like wind ripping off a few branches or tipping a tree over or an ice storm doing the same, the damaged trees become places where other creatures benefit, a healthy forest always with its share of vigorous and declining trees.
Porkies crave salt and are responsible for chewing on canoe paddles, ax handles, and other valuable items that have salty residue from the sweaty palms. While they usually are able to find trees with hollows at their base as a place to get out of the weather, they are not against inhabiting an outhouse or cabin left vacant. There they can leave piles of fecal pellets as well as chewed cabinets and chair legs. When we bought a piece of land on the other side of the bay from the mushroom woods, an old cabin giving in to gravity and lack of use was still there. My wife’s family knew it as the “Rustic Roost” and had seen it in better condition. My first looks at it suggested “Porcupine Palace” as more fitting name as one or more porcupines had used it as a winter getaway leaving an enormous mound of pellets and the stench of porcupine urine.
With no seeming benefit to man or dog and enough concentrated damage to stands of trees grown for lumber, porcupines have been deemed worthy to have a price on their head – bounties. In my home state of Maine, a dead porcupine was worth twenty-five cents and that prize was doubled about the time I was a kid. In 1955 through an official act of the state legislature, the half dollar bounty was authorized with the provision that the Commissioner of Agriculture could increase the bounty to a dollar in any municipality for a three month period whenever he determined that damage by porcupines was extensive. The bounty hunters had to present and give up all four feet of the animal to claim their reward. Bounty funds paid out were taken from fees for dog licenses, a seemingly reasonable financial nexus.
In neighboring New Hampshire and Vermont, similar bounties on porcupines were in place but those states eventually gave up on that practice and turned to the boosting and reintroduction of one its more successful predators, the fisher, a large member of the weasel family that has figured out how to get at the face and naked underbelly of porcupines without taking on quills.
In these same woods a few years back while on snowshoes, we found the track of a fisher working its way along an old logging trail now almost indiscernible as trees and shrubs have grown in its track. I have seen a fisher cross the narrow town road by our house and its tracks near the chicken coop. I will be back to see if the presence of a porcupine in this part of its large home range attracted its attention.
Early in my conservation career, I discovered that it was the habit if not policy of forest managers to shoot porcupines on sight, at least in the state of Minnesota. Carrying firearms while on the job had been restricted, but as my colleagues oriented me to the ways of our work, the sharpened shovels in the beds of pickups were there not just for planting trees or moving a bit of gravel to shore up a trail, but to dispatch any porcupine found on the ground. I soon learned that dispatching a quill pig with the rolling tires of a pickup was a celebrated skill, but only if it was done without taking on any barbs that punctured the tires. In the North Star state it is still legal to shoot a porcupine at any time of year, continuing the tradition of prickly discrimination.
Unlike the epiphany Aldo Leopold famously had after shooting into a pack of wolves in the Southwest, of how a mountain lived not in fear of wolves but of deer that had no wolves to keep them in check, the porcupine continues to receive the misplaced vitriol of those who see a damaged or dead tree as a waste. The native people of this area valued porcupines for their quills which were used as adornment for clothing and woven into small baskets. Their meat while not preferable was used when other game was unavailable. Might we not see the porcupine as one of Nature's grandest creations, a mammal whose hair evolved into quills for defense and whose presence in our woods is as much a creator of new habitat as a destroyer of trees?
In these mushroom woods on a late afternoon on the day of the winter solstice, the debarked trunks and limbs stand out against the pale grey of the thousands of trees left untouched. Here, I sense the sweep of the millennia and this scene witnessed time and again by those who came first to this land. I see “gaag” as an artist who has found a blank canvas and using its teeth as chisels has created what look like cold candles shining in the last rays of light on the shortest day of the year.
