I set out this morning before the snow stopped, eager to take full advantage of the silence that settles over the land when a major winter storm falls on the weekend. This was the first I’d worn snowshoes in a couple of years, and I began with enthusiasm, despite the fact that I sank in nearly a foot with every step. Progress was slow. My own breath moved more quickly than I did, and I was soon almost out of it.
I’d almost forgotten what a deep, dry snow was like. From time to time my footsteps set off shockwaves, quiet little booms accompanied by a sudden settling of all the snow within a few yards’ radius. Sometimes this was enough to shake the snow loose from a nearby laurel bush, the waxy green leaves springing up and throwing off their white straitjackets. Before long my calves were aching, and my glasses kept steaming up and then freezing. I finally took them off and put them in my pocket, and did most of the rest of the hike half-blind: up to the top of the watershed, through the spruce grove and out to the Far Field, alone with the sound of my exertion.
Or nearly alone. The downy woodpeckers were out and about, and a pair of cardinals foraged in one thicket. On the ridgetop not far from its den tree I crossed a porcupine trail — an almost-tunnel through the snow — and wondered whether it had been going out or returning home. Twenty minutes later, on the lower trail back from the Far Field, I had my answer.
This was shot hurriedly in dim light through a zoom lens, and then magnified further through digital zooming. But I really only took the picture to make sure of what I was looking at, especially with my glasses so fogged up. Had it not been for the location on a thin branch, I might’ve dismissed it as an unusually messy squirrel’s nest. It sat motionless with its head tucked against its belly as the snow sifted in through its forest of quills.
Porcupine,
do the sapless twigs of winter
taste any different on the tree
you’ve just girdled,
this waste of a pine?
Its whited branches light
the grove like candles,
like candelsticks.
But you with your poor eyesight
must favor the dark: hollows & cavities,
the undersides of things,
unchewed bark.
This pine was unwise to arm itself
with such soft & succulent spines.
It did nothing but hiss
like a gnawed-on road-salted tire.
Slow destroyer,
do you ever pass
those bleached roads in the air
& long for salt?
Think of the North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) as a really fat, irritable, slow-moving squirrel. (The irritable part isn’t absolutely certain, but that’s the gist of the genus name, Erithizon.) Like squirrels, porcupines are rodents at home in the trees, with an affinity also for subterranean excavations. But while tree squirrels have evolved to eat and hoard nuts, porcupines are attuned to the leaves, twigs, and bark of trees. On our mountain, they seem fondest of conifers (hemlock, white pine, and Norway spruce), chestnut oaks, elms, and fruit trees, roughly in that order, but we’ve seen them in other trees as well. In warmer months, they may graze on herbaceous plants — there’s little that’s consistent about porcupines. Though generally nocturnal, you can find them out in the middle of a sunny day, too. I suspect they don’t always sleep too well. I hear them moving around under the floor at all hours.
For creatures that spend so much of their time in trees, porcupines have remarkably poor vision, relying instead primarily on their sense of smell and hearing. They certainly don’t look like they belong in the trees, especially when they climb out on a thin branch that bends under their weight. Watching this one today made me think of a trained bear on a unicycle — it just didn’t look natural. But their claws and the rough soles of their feet, together with their tails, seem more than adequate to any arboreal challenge.
I’ve often half-jokingly referred to them as my totem animal, but I don’t think I’m quite as strange as a porcupine — at least, not yet. Porcupines are legendary for their taste for salt, and have been known to eat tool handles, boots, snowshoes, or automobile tires encrusted with road salt. They also sometimes take a shine to radiator hoses and brake linings, and the glues in plywood are like porcupine crack.
Porcupines are fond of the dark insides of things, be they hollow trees, logs, or rock shelters, and will on occasion share sufficiently large shelters with other porcupines, each keeping a studious distance from the others. Though they’re quiet much of the time, they can make a lot of different noises when irritated or aroused. Mating season — late summer and early fall — brings out their full repertoire of coughs, grunts, whines, wails, and moans. Love-struck male porcupines are also said to perform elaborate dances, culminating in a spray of urine over the head of the female.
That may sound a little bizarre, but let’s face it: we’re talking about creatures who are fiercely solitary for most of their existence, and who spend way more time communing with the wind in the treetops than with others of their own kind. Oh, and there’s the matter of the 30,000 hollow barbed quills covering their bodies. That should be enough to make almost anyone a little strange, one would think.
Believe it or not, though, a coat of easily removable quills is a practical enough defensive strategy to have evolved twice. New World and Old World porcupines, like New World and Old World vultures, are not closely related, and resemble each other because of convergent evolution. It would be nice to say that similar ecological niches summoned them into existence — which was the case with vultures — but in fact it is only the New World porcupines that have a close affinity with trees. Many South American species actually have prehensile tails.
Porcupines have two main enemies here in Pennsylvania: people, and the large weasels known as fishers, which are quick enough to dart in, flip them over, and attack their unprotected bellies before they can react. We’ve found a number of dead porcupines around the mountain since the return of the formerly extirpated, reintroduced fishers some five years ago, though it’s possible that bobcats have also killed a few. Fishers are just as solitary as porcupines, and have huge territories, so the death of a fisher two weeks ago on a small road a half-mile from the base of the mountain was probably very good news for our porcupine population — and bad news for the trees that, for whatever reason, have the misfortune of attracting porcupines year after year.
The poor eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) in the above video is one such tree. It’s one of the few hemlocks in the upper half of the hollow, and as such gets more than its fair share of attention from the conifer-loving porcupines. It’s undergone such radical pruning over the last couple of decades, I’m amazed it’s still alive, but hemlocks can take a long time to decide to cash in their chips. They’re not, however, the sort of tree to sprout a bunch of new branches in response to pruning, so this particular tree has simply become more and more skeletal, with vestigial tufts of needle-bearing twigs at the ends of most of its branches. Judging from the appetite of the porcupine I watched feasting on it today, this winter might well be its last. Porcupines can consume up to a pound of cellulose a day. This is said, by the way, to make them smell like old sawdust, though I admit I’ve never gotten quite close enough to one of them to see if that’s true.
*
Don’t forget to submit tree-related posts to the February 1 edition of the Festival of the Trees by January 30. Here’s the call for submissions. Ash laments that he has yet to receive any bark rubbings.
This is without a doubt the Undiscovery Channel’s finest production to date, and possibly the most gripping, action-packed 6 minutes and 14 seconds of film you will ever see.
Actually, all kidding aside, this is the closest I’ve ever been to a pocupine while it was feeding. Usually they’re at least thirty feet off the ground, and most often it’s after dark, so all I see is a fuzzy silhouette against the stars accompanied by the sound of chewing. This one, which currently resides in the crawlspace under my house, for some reason late this afternoon decided to snack on the ornamental cherry in front of my porch — only the second time that tree has been chewed on by a porcupine, I think. I discovered it there when I stepped outside to toss an apple core into the weeds.
There was barely enough light to shoot; you can see how darkness is falling in the last couple minutes of the video. A minute in, you can hear the clacking of teeth as the suddenly alarmed porcupine finally notices me standing there. And then it decides I’m harmless — not that very many things can harm a porcupine — and goes back to feeding. The camera’s memory card only allows a little over three minutes of video, so I had to go in and unload the first part before filming the second part, hence the break in the action part-way through.
Porcupines always remind me of something Tove Jansson, the great Finnish children’s author and artist, might’ve dreamed up. It’s gratifying to know that we still share the earth with such creatures. And as regular readers of this blog know, I feel a certain affinity for porcupines: fellow loners who really, really like trees.
Yesterday evening, about an hour before dark, I decided to listen to some music — something I rarely do any more, aside from the occasional YouTube music video — while enjoying a cold beverage out on my front porch. The living room, being currently carpetless and devoid of furniture, is a great echo chamber, so I carried in my old boombox, set it on the floor, and put in an R. L. Burnside tape. It sounded good.
About five minutes later, I was startled out of my reverie by something banging out from underneath the porch. I went over to the rail and looked down: it was the porcupine. As I watched, he waddled across the yard and began climbing the elm tree, which was killed by Dutch elm disease two years ago. “Hey, you moron!” I called. “That tree’s DEAD!”
The porcupine ignored me and continued climbing. His purpose became clear when he reached the first big crotch and promptly stretched out and went to sleep. I was chagrined. You might think I have it made, living out here in the woods — that I never have to worry about bothering anybody. But it’s not really any different than living in town. I can’t even play my music loud after supper without disturbing the neighbors in the crawl space under the house, most of whom probably work the night shift.
Thanks to my friends Chris and Seung for the use of their laptop and high-speed internet to upload the above video, which I shot in Plummer’s Hollow last week. (I wasn’t using the zoom — the porcupine really was that close!)
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
Loading
Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!
Order from the publisher or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop" Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
Smorgasblog
Mark Doty
And then, when they were done, I turned my head and saw, on a video screen, my own heart. It was golden, and pulsing, and resembled a cross between a Georgia O'Keefe flower and a jellyfish.
----
Dick Jones' Patteran Pages
The painter washes his hands on the flannel of the sky
Everything is in gouts of colour
And the hats of the passing women are comets
across the evening’s fire.
----
Parmanu
But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
----
Mutating the Signature
Don’t bring your tires
stripped of hot rims, or used
condoms, syringes or jumbo sized
needles. Leave the headless
doll in the truck, along with wrappers,
giddy snack vestiges and Keystone
cans.
----
the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
----
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
----
everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
----
slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
----
Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
----
Subscribe to Smorgasblog