In a fit of boredom I was looking at the roadkill tracking websites for California and Maine. I wasn't overly surprised by some of what I saw on their sites, for instance California has a lot of dead racoons, skunks, and opossums. But when I looked at the Maine site I was saddened by what I saw, lots of dead porcupines. I have a soft-spot for porcupines because they get a bad rap. Really who can resist this level of cuteness in a woodland creature? I know what your thinking they have razor sharp spikes that they can throw at you, how can you think it's cute? First of all let's do a little experiment. Stand up and move away from whatever your reading this on and in your best headbanger move bang your head forward making sure not to hit anything. Are strands of your hair stuck into the nearby wall? No, I didn't think so. A common urban myth is that porcupines can throw their quills, those spiky things on their backs, which is not true. They can throw their quills about as well as you can throw your hair across the room after all a quill is nothing more than modified hair. Porcupines when they feel threatened will whip their tails around and whack at their attacker leaving them full of some of those 30,000 quills. Porcupines will also arch their backs, raise their quills in a defensive posture, and shake when their attacker gets near increasing the chances of one or more of the quills having enough force to get lodged in their attacker.
These quills are a work of art when it comes to animal defense. They are hollow and barbed (hooked) at one end which allow them to stick easily into anything. Once these quills are embedded in something warm they expand making them harder to remove. Muscle twitching also helps to drive the quill deeper into an animals or human's skin. So the best thing to do if you end up with a porcupine quill in you is to relax that muscle and pull the quill out with a pair of pliers. If you forgot to bring your first aid kit with you have no fear porcupine quills have a antibacterial fatty layer on them, so you have a little while to get back to where you can was your wound and put a bandage on.
Quills are not just good for defense they also serve the purpose of helping the porcupines to float. Quills are hollow in the inside and since porcupines have about 30,000 it acts as a built in life preserver which is useful to an animal which is an avid swimmer.
So why are their so many dead porcupines in Maine? Probably because their is so much great habitat for them there. They love to eat hemlock, birch, maples, and skunk cabbage just to name a few. They roam through forests and wetland areas following their nose to tasty bits. While they have a great sense of smell they have bad eyesight. Porcupines also have a love of salt which has led them to eat such crazy things as outhouse seats and wooden canoe paddles. During some times of the year the porcupines maybe drawn to the roads because we humans salt road surfaces and porcupines being slow moving dark colored nocturnal animals motorists just don't have enough time to get out of their way. The rest of the year they just fall victim to trying to cross the roads to get over to a preferred foods and not moving fast enough.
Want to know more:
http://animal.discovery.com/mammals/remove-porcupine-quills.htm
http://www.outdoors.org/publications/outdoors/2009/wildwisdom/porcupine-bounty.cfm
http://www.nhptv.org/natureworks/porcupine.htm
http://theiwrc.org/kids/Facts/Mammals/porcupine.htm
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