Other Mammals - Sounds Wild
Quill Coat and Fisher

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Transcript

The Quill coat

On a fall day in southeast Alaska near Juneau I’m deer hunting, sneaking through the coastal rainforest. I spot a big cavity in the roots under a spruce tree, and there’s fresh dirt thrown out – something has been digging. Is it a bear den? I cautiously approach and peering into the darkness I see what looks like a porcupine. It’s not moving and as I lean closer, I smell it – it’s dead. But it’s also not really a porcupine. I pull it out with a stick and discover that it’s a porcupine skin– all the fur and hair and quills, but the body is gone. It’s very weird.

Doing some research, I learn there’s a name for this. It’s called a quill coat. There’s a predator that is skilled at killing porcupines, and it’s able to completely skin the animal before eating it – leaving the quill coat behind. That animal is a fisher, a large cat-like weasel – bigger than a marten and smaller than a wolverine. Fisher are new in the Juneau area, expanding their range west along the Taku River from British Columbia down to the coast. Fisher attack a porcupine’s vulnerable areas, biting the face and flipping them over to tear into the soft, quill-free underbelly. They’re good climbers and can climb down a tree head-first – all the better to take out a porcupine that’s climbing up.