Porcupine

Having got distracted by other things, I almost forgot about this. This is again from the east side of the cascades in Washington during a tracking intensive class.

Pretty early on we found these rather large porcupine tracks with the coyote tracks going along side. The coyote tracks look older (to me anyway), but are actually fresher - we found places in the trail where the coyote tracks wiped out the porcupine tracks.

A couple of characteristics I like in porcupine tracks are visible in the picture above if you click the image to enlarge it. First you can see the pebbly surface of their foot pad and second notice how the claws register in front and to the inside of the pads. If you aren't familiar with how claws show up in long-clawed animals, it might not be immediately obvious which marks are the claws. Looking at the picture though, there is a line a little in front of each of the tracks that angles backwards a little bit. Claws showing up like that and the inward angled feet seem to be pretty standard for other animals with long claws as well (e.g. badgers).

As fresh as these tracks looked, we hoped to find the animal. And there were many other porcupine tracks throughout the area we were looking. We expected them to be up in a tree during the day, and in that area they seem to really like russian olive trees, so we kept our eyes out. In can be a little difficult telling a porcupine apart from a birds nest or just a bunch of sticks/branches at a distance. Around lunch time Brian spotted this porcupine up in a tree out across a marshy area, so we all headed over to take pictures and look at it.

It had been in the tree for a little while as evidenced by some freshly chewed branches around the tree. As we made our way toward it, it climbed down the tree as if to head out away from us. As we got close, it thought better of it though and climbed back up the tree and watched us warily until we left.