Discovery’s favorite animal-tracking puzzler
Since our first years leading kids into the winter-woods in the mid 1980s, Xalakʼáchʼ, porcupine, has been our teacher. On tracking field trips, we can usually find ‘niptwigs,’ cast down from treetops, where our most ubiquitous large rodent has patiently defoliated the high canopy. Discovery Southeast naturalists try not to lecture or hand out nature-factoids, especially in the field, but rather to instill curiosity through a socratic Q-&-A process. Often we even suspend the “A”s. Hmmmm . . . maybe for now, there IS no answer . . .
Often there are more than just niptwigs. Sometimes kids find turds, like stubby, curved tootsie rolls, and if we’re really lucky, a pungent smell, hinting that the clue-maker is still in the tree. We ask students to look up. There’s nothing to instill a lifelong fascination with tracking like actually finding the track-maker.
On new years day, 2024, I filmed not one but a pair of smallish porcupines, close to the top of an open-grown spruce on a mist-shrouded avalanche runout cone. That seemed odd; niptwigging is typically solo practice. Reviewing the video, I also began to wonder if I’d been mistakenly describing needle-nipping protocol for 40 years. From all those branch-tips on the ground, I assumed it was a ‘corn-on-the-cob‘ process, like red squirrels rotating spruce cones, flinging off bracts and swallowing seeds, too fast to actually see.
I should have realized though, that especially when bouncing on slender branches, some distance from the trunk, a porcupine can’t risk sitting back on haunches to free up her hands. As this video shows, porkies employ the mountaineer’s cautious 3-to-4 points of contact at all times. Check it out, and see if you agree that my corn-on-the-cob hypothesis is out-the window. . .
But wait a minute! if they don’t nibble needles from clipped off branches, how come so many end up lying on the ground?! I’m counting on our large community of Xalakʼáchʼ fans to answer this pressing question. Send me your thoughts, and I’ll add them to this page. Gunalchéesh!