3 days Ago
There are a lot of ways I think about this time of year. It is the annual nail-biting stress of waiting to see if the last tomato will ripen before first frost. It’s the moment in the earth’s wobbly journey around the sun when we start to notice longer nights and shorter days, slanting light and morning mist.
It is also apple season — or, as I sometimes think of it, porcupine time. A good wild apple year like this one almost always brings a few daytime encounters with these solitary, oddball members of the rodent family. I was driving back up the hill from Dalton to Windsor a few mornings ago when the driver ahead of me slowed to a stop.
Another car coming down the hill toward us did the same. In the safe space between them, a porcupine tentatively stepped onto the road and trundled toward the other side. About a third of the way across, it briefly froze, turned as if to go back, then turned again and continued on its original path toward a tangled patch of brush studded with three or four old apple trees.
Porcupines are slow and awkward on the ground. They walk as if they only just learned how — one tentative paw after the other. I imagine an internal monologue along the lines of “right front, left rear, left front, right rear .
.. easy does it.
” By the time this one reached safety and we were all able to continue our journeys, it had created the Windsor equivalent of a morning drive-time traffic jam. Only a day or two later after my first porcupine encounter, we were walking Rosie around the fields when something caught her attention at the base of one of the old apple trees near the marsh. It was another porcupine — this one preparing to make its way up the tree for some apple snacks.
Fortunately, we called Rosie back in time, and the porcupine continued on its mission, paying us no mind. That’s two porcupine encounters in a single week, both in daylight and neither one leading to the emergency vet in South Deerfield. That is a personal best, if I don’t include the winter morning a couple of years ago when I came across a dead maple tree in the woods next to our house with three sleeping porcupines parked on three different limbs.
The overall effect was like a giant wooden hat rack. Porcupines are conflict-averse and solitary vegetarians strangely prone to falling out of the trees that they spend most of their time in. How is it that they are not only not endangered but thriving? Those famous quills — up to 30,000 per animal — are a powerful protective adaptation for sure, keeping them safe from most local predators.
(Fishers are the main exception.) But a porcupine on the run tops out at just two miles per hour. The lack of natural predators has led to what naturalists call “a weak flight response,” which is one reason that most of the porcupines we see are already dead, killed by vehicles.
Their social structure is almost nonexistent. The males are mostly loners, though they will sometimes share a tree in winter. The females keep strictly to themselves except during mating season, after which they head out on their own, giving birth to a single porcupette (yes, that is the technical term) seven months later.
The young is born with soft quills that quickly harden and after five months is ready to set off on his or her own solitary lifetime path — a long one, as they can live for a quarter-century. One researcher reported that 30 percent of porcupines in his study population showed evidence of old fall injuries. If you’ve ever seen one up in an apple tree reaching for fruit, you’ll understand why: a combination of boundless optimism that even a skinny branch will hold their weight and an insatiable hunger driven by the need to put on fat stores for the coming winter.
Awkward. I first came across the term “ charismatic megafauna ” when we lived in Kenya. The conservation community uses the term to refer to the big animals tourists on safari most want to see that often serve as the public face of efforts to raise funds and awareness for habitat and wildlife preservation efforts: elephants, giraffes, lions, leopards — the stylish show-stoppers of the wild.
(China’s giant pandas were the first species to be tagged with this label, back in the mid-1980s.) The broad idea is that these animals are so beloved that we humans will spend money and work hard to save them and the places they live, preserving ecosystems critical to survival for many additional species along the way. This leads to another label: umbrella species, reflecting the hope that the star power of pandas, whales, elephants and the like can protect those lesser-known plants and animals.
That’s a big responsibility, and it’s not at all clear that this strategy is working. Of the “top 10” charismatic megafauna, only pandas have seen a slight increase in their population. The rest are losing ground.
Porcupines seem to me the opposite of charismatic megafauna. Painfully awkward midsize fauna doesn’t have much of a ring to it. They also lose points for unintentionally causing countless stressful trips to the vet.
No wildlife organizations are putting them on tote bags or T-shirts as far as I know. On the other hand, maybe there’s something to be said for the unconventional, under-the-radar life of the solitary porcupine, flourishing in the absence of the spotlight, not being asked to hold the umbrella or pose for yet another magazine cover..
