SPECIAL REPORT: Where have all the porcupines gone?

Porcupines are declining in the Pacific Northwest, but the evidence is largely anecdotal and the reasons are speculative

By Dawn Stover. August 29, 2024. The top of the lodgepole pine is brittle and rust-colored. The tree’s middle section is missing some of its bark, and it has vertical ridges beneath layers of hardened sap that look like yellow wax dripping down a candle.

Joy Markgraf and her late husband Frank planted this tree many years ago, and now it is dying.

Nevertheless, Markgraf is happy to see the damage done to the tree. It’s a sign that she probably has a North American porcupine living on her property in Washington’s western Klickitat County.

Markgraf and many other naturalists, professional and amateur, are wondering why they so rarely see porcupines in parts of the Pacific Northwest where they were once abundant.

The prickly creatures seem to be experiencing widespread decline, but reports are largely anecdotal because government agencies have little interest in, or resources for, studying porcupines.

Porcupines are considered a nuisance species by many landowners and state wildlife agencies, but they play an important role ecologically and are culturally important to many Native American Tribes.

There are several theories about why porcupines are declining, but wildlife agencies have no mandate to solve the mystery.

And many of these agencies are still actively encouraging the killing of porcupines.

Hunting for porcupines

With tiny flies swarming her face during a light spring rain, Markgraf points to a plywood “Private Property” sign nailed to a large Douglas fir tree. The edges of the sign have been chewed off, another sign of a porcupine at work, Markgraf says.

Because their vegetarian diet is low in sodium, porcupines are salt-craving, and plywood glue is salty.

The animals’ salt-eating propensity also leads some porcupines to get run over by cars on salted roads.

Markgraf has learned to look for other signs of porcupine activity: downed sprigs of green pine needles that have been snipped off with a clean diagonal cut; pill-shaped scat up to an inch in length; and flat-footed tracks with big, pebbly heel pads.

“This is beautiful porcupine country,” says Markgraf of her land, which is protected from logging. Yet she has seen only two live porcupines here in the last 20 years.

She’s not alone. Many other longtime residents of western Klickitat County have also reported that they rarely, if ever, see porcupines where they once encountered them regularly.

Constant battle: Porcupines have no legal protections in any state. Photo: USDA/NRCS Montana

Bonnie Reynolds and her family moved to a home in the woods at the bottom of Flat Top Mountain near Trout Lake, Wash., in 1977. They soon acquired a boxer puppy they named Sir Nigel Loring, and later a second dog they named Lady Loring.

One night Reynolds and her husband returned from a dance to find Nigel and Lady lit from behind by their porch light and sporting full-body halos of porcupine quills.

“Hundreds of them!” Reynolds recalls.

Lady learned her lesson, but Nigel developed a “hateful passion” for porcupines.

After several more encounters—and expensive vet bills—the family found a new home for Nigel.

In 1986, the Reynolds family moved to a home on the flatlands outside Trout Lake, where they occasionally had to wait for a porcupine to get off a small bridge before they could pass. And when Reynolds accidentally brushed up against a porcupine on the road, she barely made it to work, because quills had punctured her Volkswagen Dasher’s fuel hose.

But neither Reynolds nor her husband can recall seeing a porcupine since about early 1990.

Their experience is common in western Klickitat County.

In a Facebook post to neighbors in the rural, forested Snowden community located northeast of White Salmon, Wash., 42-year-old Jason Poppen wrote that he hadn’t seen a porcupine “since I was a little kid” and asked whether anyone else had seen one. Of the 15 neighbors who responded, only one had seen a porcupine in the past decade, and several people reported that local teens had been paid by timber companies to kill porcupines.

Precipitous decline

Researchers, too, suspect that porcupines are disappearing. Declines have been reported from Arizona to British Columbia.

The Cascades Forest Conservancy, for example, has seen a wide variety of species at its wildlife survey sites in remote areas of southwest Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

But the group has never caught a porcupine on any of its 50-plus wildlife cameras

North American porcupine range in gray. Map: Prevention and Control of Wildlife Damage

In 2021, a team led by Cara Appel, then a graduate student in wildlife science at Humboldt State University, reported that porcupine populations may be declining in the Pacific Northwest and other areas.

The team compiled hundreds of confirmed occurrences of porcupines in Washington, Oregon and northern California between 1908 and 2018. The sources included roadkill databases, which accounted for most of the occurrences, as well as photographs of live sightings.

The researchers compared the occurrence records from the years 1981 to 2010 with those from 2012 to 2018 and saw a decline in most areas across the region.

They also identified an apparent shift in the distribution of porcupines away from forested areas and toward grassland and desertscrub habitats.

Porcupines have no legal protections in any state. However, California porcupines are listed as a Species of Special Concern.

The California-based Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center conducted a yearlong effort in 2011 to collect reports of any porcupine sightings, including roadkills, from Lake Tahoe south to the southern end of the Sierra Nevada. The search, which covered millions of acres, turned up only 14 live porcupines and eight roadkills.

Montana is considering a Species of Special Concern listing for porcupines. Jessy Coltrane, a wildlife biologist at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, says porcupines were once abundant in northwest Montana but have experienced a “precipitous decline” and now are “virtually extirpated.”

“It’s like if you lived out East and gray squirrels disappeared,” says Coltrane.

The evidence is “totally anecdotal,” says Coltrane. “It’s universal, though. Porcupines are incredibly rare west of the Continental Divide in Montana.”

Prickle-pigs and porcupettes

Porcupines, which are sometimes called prickle-pigs or quill pigs, are the United States’ second-largest rodents (after beavers). But unlike most rodents, they’re long-lived and slow to reproduce.

A porcupine mother gives birth to only one baby a year.

The “porcupette,” as the baby is adorably named, is born with about 30,000 soft quills that harden within a few hours of birth. Because of the lengthy, seven-month gestation period, it doesn’t take long before the porcupette is ready to walk around and climb trees.

Newborn: Porcupines have a distant relationship to guinea pigs. Photo: Patrick Pleul/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Porcupettes stay with their mothers for a year or so, but after that lead mostly solitary lives except when breeding.

Contrary to popular belief, porcupines cannot “shoot” their quills, which are a modified type of hair that comes in different lengths and thicknesses.

But these specialized hairs are barbed and can work their way into internal organs if they pierce the skin or are ingested or inhaled.

Because porcupines don’t hibernate and are herbivores, they have a tough time in winter.

“They’re basically eating the most toxic thing out there,” says Coltrane, who studied porcupines in Alaska and confirmed that they survive on nutrient- and energy-poor conifer needles and the inner bark of trees by packing on fat before winter.

Porcupine decimation

Why are porcupines so scarce?

“It’s one of the great ecological mysteries,” Germaine White, education specialist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, told the Flathead Beacon in Montana.

In 2021, the Natural Resources Department of the Tribes published a report that said: “Tribal Wildlife Biologists have witnessed a decline in porcupine numbers in recent years and ask for public volunteers to assist in reporting sightings of porcupines in the field.”

The Tribes are centered on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana but stretch across the Pacific Northwest.

The Tribes’ biologists have several theories about why porcupines are disappearing. One possibility is that people have been killing them.

Porcupines have a long history of persecution by humans.

In 2006, a 16-year-old in Klickitat County died in a “hunting accident” when he saw a porcupine in the road while driving. He grabbed his rifle, jumped out of his vehicle and hit the porcupine with the butt of his loaded rifle, which discharged into his chest.

It’s not uncommon for loggers, orchardists, dog owners and others to kill porcupines when given the opportunity.

Porcupines not only damage trees but also equipment such as axes and boots salted with human sweat.

Extensive and determined culling, poisoning and bounty hunting of porcupines continued until at least the mid-20^th century. Government agencies, as well as individuals and land managers, targeted porcupines.

Porcupines were “pretty much killed on sight,” says Coltrane. “They were target practice for a lot of people.”

Perhaps porcupines, which reproduce slowly, haven’t yet recovered from the decimation.

But it isn’t just humans that are killing porcupines.

Natural predator: A member of the mustelid or weasel family, fishers are native to Washington forests. They have a unique, and grisly, method of hunting porcupines. Photo: WDFW

Natural predators of the porcupine are also recovering from human actions that took them to the brink of extinction.

Chief among them are cougars (also known as mountain lions or pumas) and fishers, both of which are making a comeback in the Pacific Northwest.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cougars captured for tagging often had quills in their faces, Coltrane says, but biologists in Montana aren’t seeing that anymore. Porcupines are eaten infrequently by cougars and other predators such as bobcats and wolves.

But fishers are especially adept at killing porcupines, which are an important food source for them.

Fishers are fierce, carnivorous weasels that kill porcupines by forcing them out of trees and repeatedly biting them on the face. The porcupine can then be carefully eaten, starting with the underbelly and parts of the head and neck that aren’t well protected by quills.

The reintroduction of fishers and the resurgence of other predators may have made life more precarious for porcupines.

Because porcupines have special adaptations for winter survival, some scientists suggest it’s possible that their abundance and distribution is shifting in response to a warming climate.

But porcupines occupy a huge range of environments and seem to be very adaptable, so other scientists doubt that climate shifts are responsible for the decline.

Another theory is that porcupines thrived during logging booms that created stands of young trees but declined as forests became less hospitable to porcupines, according to Appel, who is a PhD candidate at Oregon State University, in an Oregon Wild webcast about porcupines of the Pacific Northwest.

Most likely, a combination of factors is driving down porcupine numbers.

“It’s a perfect storm,” says Coltrane.

Ecologically and culturally important

In addition to being important prey for fishers and other predators, porcupines play a role similar to beavers and woodpeckers by nibbling on needles and bark. Their feeding can create standing dead trees that function as important wildlife habitat.

“Tree damage” can also create forest openings that allow light to reach the understory. And it can remove saplings that might otherwise crowd out slower-growing trees of other species.

“It can be argued that porcupines may be long-term agents of ecological diversification,” wrote Uldis Roze in The North American Porcupine, the authoritative text on the species. Roze is a professor emeritus at Queens College who, with his wife Stephanie, spent decades observing porcupines near their cabin in the Catskills of New York.

Porcupines also have cultural significance for many Native American Tribes.

Porcupine hair roaches are a traditional male headdress often worn by dancers at powwows and other social gatherings. Roaches are typically made from the long, pliable “guard hairs” of the porcupine.

Porcupine hairs are also used in quillwork, an art form that predates the European colonization of North America.

Quilled ceremonial shirt: From the 1820s, this Nez Perce men’s ceremonial shirt is made of hide and decorated with a rosette of quill-wrapped horsehair. This is a specialized technique in which quills are wrapped and stitched around a small bundle of horsehair, coiling outward and accented by white glass tradebeads. Shoulder strips are also decorated with quillwork. Photo: Nez Perce National Historical Park/Nez Perce Tribe

The oldest known quillwork was found on a pair of moccasins, but quillwork is also used to decorate clothing, basketry, knife handles and other items.

In a diary entry made on Aug. 21, 1805, William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) noted that the native people along the Salmon River of Idaho “sometimes ornament their mockersons with various figures wrought with the quills of Porcupine.”

For the Nez Perce Tribe of that area, porcupines are seen as a symbol of protection, according to Andrea Whiteplume, who works for the Tribe as a climate change specialist in the Spokane area and comes from a long line of quillers.

There are several ways to obtain quills for quillwork.

You can find a dead porcupine, typically a roadkill. You can kill a live animal. You can sustainably harvest quills by throwing a blanket over a porcupine and removing the quills that get hooked by the blanket. You can even order quills from Amazon.

Working with quills is challenging. The barbed ends are snipped from the quills, which are softened in water, sorted by type and size and often dyed.

Flattened quills can then be used—together with rawhide and other materials—in a variety of painstaking techniques that include weaving, wrapping and stitching.

Quillwork was once widespread, and even Tribes that didn’t live in porcupine habitat bartered for quills from other Tribes.

But after the arrival of Europeans, many Native artists instead began trading for glass beads, which are more colorful and easier to work with.

Quillwork today is becoming a lost art, and the decline of porcupines isn’t helping matters.

The killing continues

In Washington state, the reintroduction of fishers is a success story.

Over-trapping, habitat loss and other factors wiped out the state’s fishers by the mid-1900s.

But from 2008 through 2021, some 279 fishers from British Columbia and Alberta were reintroduced to forests in the Washington Cascades and Olympic Peninsula.

Surveys suggest that the reintroduced fishers are reproducing and spreading. However, fishers remain a state endangered species.

Although porcupines are typically mentioned as a major component of the fisher’s diet, particularly in winter when other prey may be scarce, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife seems to have little interest in protecting—or even studying—this link in the food chain.

In fact, the department considers the porcupine to be a “nuisance” species and provides instructions for trapping it.

The number of porcupines captured using Special Trapping Permits issued by the department has hovered between 200 and 350 animals per year since 2014, even as the species seems to be declining

This type of permit, intended to provide relief for property damage (to commercially valuable trees) allows the holder to use body-gripping traps for nuisance wildlife.

In 2022, the most recent year for which data have been released, close to 450 porcupines were trapped. Because porcupines are viewed primarily as tree damagers, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has little other data on their occurrence.

Agency biologist Jeff Lewis, who works on the fisher recovery program, is quick to note that fishers are efficient killers of porcupines.

In many places, this is seen as a benefit of fisher reintroduction.

Lewis says porcupines “are so low on the agency’s radar that it’s rare to have a conversation about them.”