On the day we happened to scare a porcupine to death, we were walking through a forest of towering white pines. The soft forest floor muffled our footsteps. All was quiet and peaceful until one of our party let out a very loud “Aaaachooo!!!” Just like that, we heard a crash coming from the top branches of a pine. Crash, crash-ety, crash…thud.
We hurried over to see what had fallen from the tree. There lay a dead porcupine. Well, it had been alive until it fell and hit its head on a rock. Fortunately, we weren’t directly underneath that.
I reckoned that climbing around in the top of a very tall white pine is rather dangerous. Let me speculate about what the porcupine might have been doing up there in the pine tree. I suspect it was out on the tip of one of the upper boughs, reaching out to nip off a branch so it could eat some particularly tasty-looking pine needles. Then, without warning, a terrific sneeze startled it so that it lost its balance and tumbled to the boulder-covered ground.
I find it interesting how porcupines spend so much time up in trees, at least during the fall and winter, feeding on bark and pine needles. Many times I’ve seen birches with stripped bark, or scatters of hemlock or pine branches a porcupine has snipped off and dropped. Those feeding signs drew my attention to the porcupines perched above.
One February day, I went out to check for signs of life at a recently discovered porcupine den in some boulders. Around the den there was no trail or even tracks in the patches of snow. Neither were there any nearby birch trees with large areas of chewed-off bark.
I was beginning to think the den was abandoned. On a hunch, I went over to a nearby giant white pine, one that towered over the surrounding forest. Sure enough, there lay snipped pine twigs scattered around under the tree. I stood looking up into the treetop, searching for the porcupine and pondering what it would be like to be way up there in the tree, perhaps for days on end.
I decided that the pine, the nipped twigs, and the fact that the porcupine was likely up there made a great, picture-worthy subject. I got down on the ground to get a good perspective of the situation, trying this position and that position. OUCH! I felt a poke on my left arm. There, sticking through my coat sleeve, shirt sleeve, and ever so slightly into my arm was a porcupine quill! It must’ve been a shed quill that was lying on the ground, and I picked it up with all my moving around.
Fortunately, the quill just poked my arm enough to make a mark, and the quill’s many barbs didn’t engage my skin like they did the cloth of my coat. It’s good I didn’t let out a yell. Come to think of it, I’m very glad I didn’t sneeze loudly while I was there under the porky’s pine.
There is a bright side to the damage to the trees from the nipped branches and stripped bark. I’ve noticed these damaged places leak sap, and, on mild winter days, many kinds of insect visitors show up to feed. Some of the visitors I’ve seen are butterflies, winter moths, winter fireflies, midges, flies, and ants. Once I saw a midge show up at a porcupine chew that was a busy ant-feeding spot. The midge tried to sneak a snack, but the ant was not happy about that. It wasn’t a fair fight. The ant won.
Have you ever seen a porcupine fall from a tree? Or seen a porcupine busy feeding in a tree? Winter is a good time to get out and watch that, and a bonus is seeing the gathering of insects around damaged areas. If you are out in a porcupine woods though, it might be a good idea to muffle any sneezes.