Other Mammals - Sounds Wild
Porcupine in Winter

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Porcupines in Winter

Hiking through the woods on a winter day I come across the tell-tale sign of a porcupine - the crusty snow under a spruce tree is littered with twigs, needles and small branches, nipped off and dropped as the porcupine feeds. She's camped out in the branches up above and from the number of the nip-twigs, she's been there for a while.

The area beneath a winter porcupine tree can become a kind of feeding station for other animals trying to survive. Snowshoe hares come to eat porcupine leftovers, then lynx and coyotes come in for the hares. It's amazing how many different animal tracks you can find in the snow around one of these trees.

Porcupines live within a home range and during winter cold snaps or storms, they den up, sheltering in a rock crevice, root wad, hollow log, or, like this porcupine, up in a tree. They don't hibernate, but grow a thick furry undercoat for insulation beneath their famous quills.

Like North America's other large rodent, the beaver, porcupines eat the soft inner bark of trees known as cambium. They leave distinctive tooth-marked bare patches on tree trunks, where they gnaw away the bark and eat the underlying cambium. In Southcentral they feed on birch and white spruce cambium, as well as spruce needles. In Southeast they eat Sitka spruce needles and twigs, and in the north they may subsist on willow twigs. For SW…