Like beavers and woodpeckers, porcupines play an important role in their ecosystem. But, because they have a tendency to damage trees, porcupines are often considered a nuisance species. In the Pacific Northwest, it’s becoming harder to find living porcupines, according to a Columbia Insight report. We learn more about the rodent from Dawn Stover, a freelance writer and regular contributor to Columbia Insight.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to end today with porcupines. Like beavers and woodpeckers, porcupines can play important roles in their ecosystems. But because they have a tendency to damage trees, these spiky rodents are often considered a nuisance species. It’s also possible that their numbers are dwindling in the Pacific Northwest, at least that’s what anecdotal reports suggest.
The freelance writer Dawn Stover wrote about porcupines recently for Columbia Insight and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Dawn Stover: Thanks, Dave. Good to be here.
Miller: Why did you want to write about porcupines?
Stover: This grew out of a personal interest. I have lived in Southwest Washington in a rural forested area for more than 32 years. And I used to see porcupines fairly often, unfortunately, mostly as roadkill, but also live. [I] just started commenting to people that I haven’t seen one in a really long time, like 20 years, and found that a lot of other people that live around me were having similar experiences.
So I got curious about this. I started talking to some wildlife biologists, and found out that there seems to be a lot of evidence suggesting that porcupines are declining in a lot of parts of the Pacific Northwest.
Miller: My understanding is that hard numbers remain hard to come by. So what kind of evidence can wildlife biologists or ecologists look for?
Stover: Well, they can look at databases of roadkill. They can look at camera traps that have been set out. For example, the Cascades Forest Conservancy has more than 50 cameras out in some remote areas of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. And they have yet to see a porcupine on any of them. And there are researchers who’ve gathered up some of this data that includes photographs that people have posted online, and they’ve compared these occurrences with occurrence records from years gone by, and then looking at more recent years.
What they’ve seen was a decline in most areas across the region, and also kind of a shift in the distribution. They’re seeing more porcupines in grassland and desert scrub habitat, and less in forested areas.
Miller: I can give you one more anecdotal tidbit here, which is probably worth nothing scientifically, which is I’ve never seen a porcupine in 16 years in the Northwest. And last summer I saw a bunch of them when I was in the Catskills in upstate New York.
What have you heard from biologists for reasons that could explain a potential or maybe likely decline in porcupine populations here?
Stover: Well, there’s a few different theories. One of them is, porcupines are really slow, not just slow in their walking and climbing, but also they’re very slow to reproduce. They only have one baby a year. And so we may be seeing kind of the after effects of the persecution of porcupines that took place, particularly in the last century when they were clubbed to death, poisoned, trapped. Basically, it was a war on porcupines, because of this reputation they have as tree damagers. So they’re not popular with the timber industry or orchardists, or dog owners, and basically were seen as an animal that should be killed whenever you see it. And there were bounties offered too, including the government programs. So one of the theories is that really decimated them and they just haven’t rebounded.
Another idea is that we’ve modified their habitat a lot. So with the logging practices we had, we may have created some forests that were actually really hospitable to porcupines for a while, and now are less hospitable to them. As you know, some of these forests have started to recover again from heavy logging.
Then I think the third popular theory is that we’re seeing perhaps the comeback of some of the predators that do eat porcupines. And there are not very many animals that eat them, but cougars will occasionally eat them. And there’s an animal called the fisher that’s a really fierce weasel that knows how to force porcupines down out of a tree by making them back down out of a tree, and then biting them in the face until they’re dead and then opening them up from the belly. It’s an animal that’s really well adapted for killing porcupines, and is being recovered right now in the Northwest.
So those are kind of the leading theories. There is an idea that maybe climate change or perhaps even a pathogen could be playing a role. But mostly it looks like it’s humans and maybe some other animals, and perhaps a combination of all those reasons.
Miller: What role do porcupines play in their habitats and their larger ecosystems?
Stover: Well this tree damaging they do is actually kind of important ecologically because it creates standing dead trees that are good habitat for some other animals. It opens up areas of the forest so that understory plants can grow. It removes some saplings that are sometimes crowding out other species. They have sort of a similar function like beavers or woodpeckers in diversifying the habitat out there.
Miller: There have been a number of books about beavers in recent years, and a political movement to embrace them, to change their designation in Oregon for example. I haven’t seen anything close to that for porcupines. How do you explain that?
Stover: I haven’t either. They’re completely unprotected basically everywhere. Beavers have attained a reputation of being good at creating fish habitat, for example, by damming up streams so that it makes habitat for them. And they’re even being introduced to some areas to help with that. But porcupines, they’re not very well studied. These wildlife agencies at the federal and state and tribal level have funding to study mandated species, like ones that are endangered or protected, and also to study species that hunters and fishers are interested in. But there really isn’t much resources out there for figuring out what exactly porcupines do in the environment, and whether we need to keep them around.
Miller: How much do you think this has to do with just a sense that these are literally or figuratively prickly creatures?
Stover: I think that’s a lot of it. They don’t shoot their quills or any of these myths about them, but they do have some very barbed quills that you do not want in your skin or in your dog’s nose. That’s just a defense mechanism. Actually in some cultures, they are seen a symbol of protection, like the Nez Perce. And so I think every piece of the ecological puzzle has a reason for being there. And some species have basically become persecuted by humans because we don’t see an economic value or maybe even a cultural value in them. But they’re clearly playing a role out there.
And as I mentioned, they are a food source for fishers, and we’re trying to reintroduce those here in the Northwest. And so it strikes me as a little bit strange that there’s a lot of money and effort going into bringing back fishers, and not very much effort if any in going to protecting one of their really important food sources.
Miller: You mentioned the Nez Perce Tribe. More broadly, what roles have you heard of porcupines playing in Native art and culture?
Stover: Quillwork, where quills are taken and softened and flattened and used in a whole bunch of different ways, with weaving and attaching them to hide, is a Native American art form that predates things like beadwork that I think people are more familiar with and has some of the similar patterns in it. [It’s] becoming something of a lost art. I don’t think necessarily because porcupines are hard to find or their quills are hard to find, but more because it’s easier to work with these and more colorful, they kind of took over. But quillwork is amazing. You can go back and look at the work that was done. When Lewis and Clark came through, they wrote about some quillwork they saw on moccasin.
And also, porcupine quills, the ones that are really long and flexible, are used a lot in roaches, which is kind of a hairpiece that’s worn at powwows and by male dancers. A lot of tribes use roaches. The guard hairs are used in roaches, that’s one of the types of hairs that porcupines produce.
Miller: It seems like it may be challenging for most of us to see a live porcupine. But are there any telltale signs we can be on the lookout for just to give us a sense that porcupines have been around there?
Stover: Yeah, I went out with an amateur naturalist who lives in my area and has put a lot of effort into trying to learn about these signs, and took me out to look for porcupines. And you can definitely look for the characteristic tree damage. You can look for pine needles that are cut off in clumps with a nice neat diagonal cut, rather than just ones that fell off. You can look for their scat or their heel pad marking. They don’t move very fast at all, and they’re active more at night, so during the day they’ll often just be sitting there in a tree. And if you are lucky enough to find one, you’ll get a really good chance to look at it. But like I said, just so many people have told me that they used to be all over and just can’t see them anymore. And I’ve been out searching the woods for them and finally saw porcupine just a week or so ago, but it was in the High Desert Museum in Bend. So I’m still hoping to see one out in the wild soon.
Miller: Any other porcupine facts that you’ve learned from your reporting that you think our listeners should know?
Stover: Well, I think they should know that the babies are called porcupettes. They’re just adorable, and I think the name is adorable, and the animals are adorable too. Maybe that would improve their reputation a little bit. They’re rodents. And unlike most rodents, they’re really slow reproducing. So they’ve got some characteristics that are quite different from other rodents that we’re more familiar with, like, say mice and rats.
And they’re just really interesting to watch. I miss seeing them because it’s interesting to see them in the wild. There’s really nothing quite like them out there.
Miller: Dawn, thanks so much.
Stover: Thanks, Dave, for having me.
Miller: Dawn Stover is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to Columbia Insight.
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