<\/a>Courtesy Photo \/ Amy Sherwin \n A porcupine shreds cottonwood leaves.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
North American porcupines typically occupy wooded areas, but they also roam out into grasslands and tundra. In some regions, they usually have home ranges less that about thirty acres, but in the Alaskan Interior, they seem to be considerably larger. And in the fall mating season, the males roam more widely. When a male finds a female, the ensuing courtship can be rather noisy — a pair outside my window, years ago, kept me awake part of the night with their whines and screeches and groans. If two males want the same female, there can be a fight, with more noise. As a courtship proceeds, eventually the male squirts urine on the female and, if she is ready, they mate — very carefully. The male is positioned behind the female, facing an array of quills, but she raises her tail over her back, covering at least some of them, and the underside of the tail has hairy bristles but no quills.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
About seven months later, if all went well, a porcupette is born in spring. Its quills are all in place but they are soft; they harden up soon after birth. Their incisors are white, initially, but gradually the front surface turns orange and hardens, as iron is taken up from the diet (mostly milk at first, but with increasing amounts of foliage). The softer back sides of the incisors wear away, leaving sharp chisel-teeth. Young ones stay with their mothers through the summer and early fall, and then become independent (while she goes off to find a male). The young ones continue to grow and are mature by the following fall.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
A porcupine wears thousands of quills over most of its body. They detach readily upon contact with an importunate dog or a would-be predator. No, the quills are not shot out or thrown! Wily predators know to attack the vulnerable belly, flipping over their prey to expose the unprotected underparts. Or they grasp a porcupine by its nose and toss it around until it weakens; fishers are reported to be very good at this technique. Porcupines are rather slow-moving critters, so running away from a perceived threat is not a good escape option. A threatened porcupine may scramble up a tree, which may work for dogs but not fishers. Or they hide forequarters between tree roots or in other crannies, so that the attacker is faced with a backside of quills and a muscular, thrashing tail loaded with quills on top.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Porcupines are herbivores, eating chiefly vegetation but sometimes adding fruit or fungi. They have a large cecum attached to the intestine, and that’s where much of the fiber digestion takes place.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
In spring and summer, they focus primarily on fresh vegetation, which has relatively few protective chemicals and is easy to digest. They are good swimmers and can forage on succulent aquatic vegetation. And they readily climb up cottonwood trees to shred the new leaves and eat catkins, sometimes staying up there to snooze on a branch that (to me) seems too small to be safe and secure.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t