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<\/p>\n“Don’t mess with Porky” was one of the early lessons I learned growing up on\u00a0the Montana farm.<\/p>\n
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The North American porcupine is our second largest rodent after the beaver.\u00a0They can approach 40 pounds in weight athough most are smaller. I photographed this one some years ago on the causeway to Antelope Island.<\/p>\n
Most everyone knows the misery\u00a0porcupines can cause for\u00a0man or beast when they’re not treated with respect. They’re not aggressive by nature but when they feel threatened\u00a0they’ll willingly defend themselves with their\u00a0fearsome quills.<\/p>\n
One of my early memories on the farm was of a neighbor’s horse that had been quilled in its pasture and the methods farmers and ranchers used in those days (early 50’s)\u00a0to extract the quills were pretty primitive. No veterinarian was called and believe me, it wasn’t pretty. The muzzle of a horse is extremely sensitive to begin with and this one probably had over a hundred quills in it. I’ll just say the restrained horse was terrified and in great pain with every extraction. I was just a young kid at the time\u00a0and the memory (and the sound)\u00a0is still seared into my brain.<\/p>\n
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And these are the source of all that misery.\u00a0I took these quills from the dead, stinky porcupine at the “porcupine bush” where I’ve been photographing birds for the last few weeks. Quills are modified hairs and each porcupine has about 30,000 of them covering their entire body except for their underbelly, face and feet. They’re incredibly light, so light you can’t even feel the weight of a\u00a0bunch of them in your hand. And each quill has 700-800 tiny one-way\u00a0barbs at its tip that make the quill much more difficult (and painful)\u00a0to pull out of the victim than was required when they went in.<\/p>\n
Scientists\u00a0have recently discovered that porcupine quills are much\u00a0sharper than we thought they were. Following is a description of their research results from the online site “Science”. It’s a bit lengthy but I highly recommend it. I think it’s fascinating, partly because the results were so unexpected.<\/p>\n
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While I was trying to arrange the quills in my fingers for the photo\u00a0above I tried to be very careful but I stuck myself several times and they didn’t come out of my skin easily. If they had gone in deeper than just my skin I can only imagine how difficult they would have been to pull out.<\/p>\n
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Several years ago I photographed this cow moose in the Uinta Mountains. From a distance I thought she was trying to eat something white because I could see her tongue maneuvering around the “white stuff” but through my lens it was instantly obvious that she’d been quilled. The poor cow had many days of misery ahead of\u00a0her before her body\u00a0would dissolve\u00a0the embedded parts of the quills. One danger is infection but there’s another. If the quills are embedded in areas of loose skin (such as the neck of a dog for example) the barbs sometimes make the quills move\u00a0deeper into the body with very serious consequences. After this\u00a0photo was taken I was somewhat relieved to see her browsing in the willows – she was actually able to eat.<\/p>\n One last porcupine story. My uncle Floyd and family (their farm adjoined ours)\u00a0had a smallish white\u00a0dog named Toby who was what I called a “grouchy sumbitch” and that was when he was having a good day. When he wasn’t he could be truly nasty, although I always had a soft spot for him. Toby was small but fearless and a relentless killer of “gophers”, skunks and even the occasional weasel when he could catch one and he showed no hesitation with porcupines – he just\u00a0plowed right in and took them on.\u00a0Needless to say we had to pull quills out of him more than once.<\/p>\n With\u00a0Toby there was only one way to do it. Floyd had an old piece of stiff, discarded carpet that he kept for just that purpose, When we could\u00a0finally catch Toby (he knew what was coming)\u00a0it took three of us to roll him up tightly, very tightly,\u00a0in the carpet with only\u00a0his face\u00a0sticking out. Then one of us would grab the pliers and we’d start\u00a0pulling them out.\u00a0Believe me that was one pissed off dog!<\/p>\n When it was over we sometimes didn’t see\u00a0him again for days, though his food always disappeared from the porch. But eventually he always forgave us in his own time and in his own\u00a0Toby way. To this day I always think of\u00a0him as a little white grizzly bear.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n PS – If you’re interested here’s a link to an older post I published about a porcupine incident<\/a> involving author Terry Tempest Williams and myself.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Don’t mess with Porky” was one of the early lessons I learned growing up on the Montana farm.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/moose-1041-ron-dudley1.jpg\" "\\"moose-1041-ron-dudley\\"")
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