Porcupine Chronicles

Why yes, that was me running through the woods with an antenna and a laundry basket.  It was a long day, so get yourself a beer or a coffee and settle in.

I’ve been struggling with the collaring aspect of this study.  During the course of a year, porcupines can lose and then gain almost half their body weight.  When they enter the winter period, they are as fat and healthy as they will be, having fed on delicious and nutritious fare for nearly six months.  They’ve been living comfortably in trees, too.  No need to expend energy on heating up a den; the world is a perfectly fine temperature from April to October. The further into winter we go, however, and heating costs began to burn energy, while food becomes increasingly void of nutrition.  In the depths of winter porcupines are generally expending more energy than what they take in in calories.  An excellent weight loss plan, but who likes a skinny porky?  Nobody – porkies should be slightly chubby.

So a porcupine who was collared in the lean times will probably find the collar getting a little snug come summer.  This makes me uncomfortable, so chances are it makes the porcupine uncomfortable. Right?

So I went into the forest with my radio equipment this spring, fully prepared to de-collar a porcupine.  By fully prepared, I mean I had a sled, a bucket, a trap, a laundry basket, a radio receiver, an antenna, notebook, sunglasses, bug spray, a bug shirt, camera, pliers, wire, scissors and a knife.

Here’s what I didn’t have;  somebody to help me carry all this s**t, and rubbers boots. oh, and a f***ing GPS unit. But that didn’t seem important at the start.

You can see where this is going.

I started at the last entry point I’d been, and immediately could tell she (Rudy) had moved from her generally predictable area.  The signal was weak.  What wasn’t weak was the mosquito population – which makes sense because of all the ankle-high standing water in the middle of the forest.  But i get paid for this s**t, right?  So I dove in, hauling the sled, etc. behind me, the antenna ahead of me, the radio receiver looped across my chest, over my bug shirt which was zipped and doubling as a walking sauna. The laundry basket was in the sled with the trap and all the other tools I thought might be useful should i capture Rudy on the ground right then and there.

[A bug shirt, for those of you who are blessedly ignorant, is much like a pullover windbreaker, but made of mesh.  The hood has a zip-on mesh front to protect your face. It doesn’t keep all the mosquitos out, but it makes you so hot and unable to see that you forget how much you hate the f’ing bugs.]

But Rudy had gone for a hike, and possibly a swim.  I pulled that sled through the blackberry patches and endless deadfall and swampy – no, WET – low spots, cursing the coming summer.  It is so much easier to drag a sled through crisp, white snow.  My hands hurt from yanking the rope free of pickers. It was slow-going, I had to stop to carry the sled over huge piles of downed trees.  i was wet up to my knees.  Finally I accepted that I wasn’t going to serendipitously happen upon Rudy, and so I put down the sled rope, made a mental note of the location (yes, that never fails) and charged forward with my radio equipment, a 17 pound trap and a laundry basket, suddenly lighter on my feet. Shortly after unburdening myself I crossed an overgrown logging road – ding ding!  I’ll remember this when I return to look for the sled!

I’d like to say that was my first mistake, but really no – and what’s that matter now?  Clearly I was hot and uncomfortable and that clouded my decision making abilities, but my first mistake had been made sometime much earlier.  I continued on for about  another 3/4 mile, making better time and closing in on that signal, and then, across a small marsh and in a surprisingly open spot, I saw her.  And I ran.  And she ran. She had shorter legs, but I was encumberd with radio and trapping equipment and a laundry basket. I dropped the heavy trap and managed to get to her before she got to a tree to climb, but not before she’d wedged herself, nose first, into the furthest corner of the hollow space created by an overturned rootball clump of a dead tree.  Drats! I managed to cover her with the laundry basket, and secure the laundry basket with deadfall. I went back for my trap, set the mouth of it under the laundry basket, covered all the gaps with sticks and felt the slightest bit of self-satisfaction, which was entirely misplaced.

She wasn’t going in to the trap while I was there, so i left to pick up my sled with all the equipment, which I was sure I could walk directly to using the sun and luck as my guide.

Of course this didn’t happen.  I’m a winter girl, and retracing ones steps in winter is idiotically easy.  You follow your steps in the snow. Or barring snow, you look through the mostly leafless trees to where you were and go there. Not rocket science. So easy an English major could (and does) do it.  Not true in June, when the trees and their glorious f***ing foliage is every direction you look.  I didn’t find the sled, however I did magically find the old overgrown logging road, which then led to the road I’d been on two hours earlier at the start of this not-on-my-position-description task.  Only problem was I was about 1 1/2 miles from where I started, and the truck.

I drew a big X in the dirt on the road where I’d emerged, and actually jogged to my truck.  My thinking was “i’ll get the truck closer, park it on that logging road, walk North for the sled, East for the porcupine.”  My thinking was still blissfully optimistic.  And shazam, I did find the truck, and did park it on the old logging road. And viola, I did find the porcupine inside the trap…after a while (I somehow came at it from a different direction, which was disconcerting)  But now here I was – drenched in sweat and swampwater, zipped up in mesh, exhausted, with a 17 pound trap full of a 14 pound porcupine,  and a laundry basket. Sweet.  And no sled, and no collar removing equipment.  Rudy was coming back to the truck with me.

If you’ve never carried one of those Tomahawk traps before, they are a bit awkward, compounded when full of 30,000 or so needle-sharp quills.  The handle, placed in the middle of the 3 foot trap, makes it difficult to carry the trap without brushing it against your leg.  Unless you have ginormous damn triceps you can’t hold it in front of you, either.  Carrying it through 10,000 miles of swampy oak wilt death forest while being hunted by prehistorically sized mosquitos will not kill you, but will make you so angry you feel like you would like to be killed and hence put out of a particularly character-building sort of discomfort.

I ended up carrying/dragging/shlepping it. Placing the beast on the other side of a big tree, climbing over the tree, picking up the trap. At one point I had one end of the trap in the laundry basket, and I weaved my fingers through the other end and dragged the whole contraption. I wondered if the trauma to the porcupine was possibly more than just leaving the collar on her.  But we made it, eventually.  I made one last half-ass attempt to find the sled with the wire-cutting equipment, but it was getting to be late, and I admit, I gave up.  I took Rudy back to headquarters, where I cut off her collar.  She was fine.

This weekend I popped in to work to check on the snapper hatchling, and to feed the little one if needed. His egg sac was much depleted when I left him, and I read that they live off of it for about a week. I thought a hot dog would do for now, along with some reptomin. I stopped with some of my family on our way to the fair. And he was gone. His makeshift home was a bread pan with some water, a soft cloth, some bark, and it was set on top of the classroom table near the window. There was simply no sign of him. Had he been freed by well-meaning nature lovers? Had PETA found me out? Had he leaped to his death? and if so, where was his little body? I searched with flashlight in hand for about 20 minutes until my family grew impatient (I think they thought i imagined him). I left a bit of hot dog in his home, which i put on the ground just in case he’d taken a day trip.
This morning I arrived at work hopeful, and found the same empty bread pan. After questioning my supervisor, who found the whole situation fairly amusing and did NOT own up to snatching the snatchling, I went on a calmer search for him, in almost all the nooks and crannys of the Skills Center. This included getting on hands and knees and looking into the horrible crevices between appliances and floor which are filled with all sorts of greasy, dusty, creepy bit and particles and webs. I looked under the gun safe, in the boxes of papertowels, behind my desk, in my shoes, nothing. I thought it unlikely he’d made the trek all the way down the hallway to the back conference/storage room, but I did a quick inspection there, too, in and among the snowshoes and buckets of antennae. This resulted in a big, fat nothing, and so I stopped. To get some fresh air, I took out recyling. When I returned, there he was, in the middle of the conference room, covered in cobwebs.

I have quite a collection of dead and desiccated baby turtles and small frogs that have come to me – unsolicited I might add – from well-meaning people with good eyes.  I love these strange and sometimes gruesome objects.  I have a couple different snapping turtle hatchlings that made it out of the egg before meeting the end.  So it was a happy day when somebody appeared in my doorway holding the blue cap of a spray paint bottle, saying “I have something for you.”

I expected a dead thing, but this little thing was quite alive.  An estimated two days old, this bugger had his egg sac still attached, and was vigorous enough to offer some snaps up to fingers waved in front of him. 

I read up on the interwebs (all truth, of course) about how to keep the little thing alive.  He looks tasty to me – I can only imagine what a little truffle he’d be for a heron or a crane.  The shell is still soft, but the claws are well-defined.  he still has the sharp little egg tooth.

I’ve put him in a glass dish with some driftwood for basking upon, and a nice soft cloth for resting.  Tomorrow I’ll get ahold of the turtle experts in my life and ask about  development, and perhaps where I can deposit him for a chance at over-wintering.

I’d like to keep him (or her – I really don’t know) but the cuteness today will later on become potentially 40 pounds of jaw and muscle.  I know better, right?  Well, maybe a few more days…