THE TRAPDOOR TO EXTINCTION
Do You Remember the Last Time You Saw a Porcupine?
By Bill Schneider, 9-22-05
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| Photo credit, Andrew Houser. www.photos.houserdesign.com | |
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One of the icons of our forests seems to be slipping away, virtually unnoticed, while wildlife managers scramble to find out what’s happening.
Wildlife biologists know the porcupine population over most of the northern Rockies (USA and Canada) has declined sharply, but they don’t know why or how serious it is. Some wildlife biologists fear we might be witnessing a major extinction event—or I should say not witnessing it.
“We know the porcupine population is declining, but we don’t know what’s going on,� notes Kerry Foresman, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana and renown small mammal expert, “but we’re trying to get funding to find out.�
Foresman is not the type of professor who spends every waking moment in dusty labs and classrooms. He’s “in the field� all the time, and he sees a plummeting porcupine population. “I’ve only seen two or three in the past five years,� he said. “And lots of other wildlife biologists are noticing the same thing.�
Currently, Foresman is trying to find funds to start a research assistant working on this problem, so we can have “some facts.� Right now, it’s only, as he puts it, “general observations.� Anecdotal information is normally considered unreliable wildlife research.
Ditto for Steve Gniadek, a wildlife biologist at Glacier National Park. “We had one sighting this summer near St. Mary,� he notes. “That’s the first reported sighting in the park in three years.�
Gniadek tells of a winter track survey park rangers did “for at least ten years� throughout the 1990s. During that time, rangers did not see one single porcupine track. “This is sort of a secretive species, and they don’t move around much,� he observes, “but they do move around, so you’d think we’d see some tracks.�
Glacier no longer has funds to continue the track survey, nor has Gniadek been able to secure money for a new project to study the porcupine decline. “I’m afraid the porcupine is already extinct in the park,� Gniadek frets.
Extinction, incidentally, occurs when a population falls below the point where it can’t recover, not when the last animal dies. And the trapdoor to extinction always seems to be open.
“What’s going on here?� Gniadek asks. “This is an important species.�
Jim Williams, wildlife manager for the Flathead region at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department agrees completely. “We don’t see that many anymore, but we have no idea what’s going on.�
Williams, however, thinks the major decline is occurring west of the Continental Divide, and that the porcupine is holding its own on the east slope, but that is, in his words, “a data-free analysis.�
None of these wildlife experts have any “best theories� on why the quill pig is disappearing, but say it’s likely to be a “combination of factors.� Those factors include changing or declining habitat, disease, predation or indiscriminate killing.
They discount habitat changes because porcupines use a wide range of habitats and there really has not been major region-wide change in habitat. Forest fires and fire management policies are one possibility, but experts doubt this could be responsible for the decline.
Some people simply like to kill things, anything, so they shoot porcupines on sight, but fortunately very few people do this. For the record, porcupines have no protection under state wildlife laws. In Idaho and Montana, it’s perfectly legal to kill every porcupine you see. The Idaho law specifically says “unprotected species� such as the porcupine “may be taken in any amount, at any time, and in any manner not prohibited by state or federal law.� Ditto for Montana where porcupines are listed as a “non-managed species.� Again, however, most people don’t have such a bloodlust and like seeing the porky harmlessly waddling along the forest floor. Mindless killing is probably not seriously contributing to the rapid decline.
In the 1940s and 1950s, foresters and timber companies actually promoted the poisoning of porcupines to save trees, but this is ancient history and really could not be affecting populations today.
As we all know, porcupines have a good defensive system, which keeps predation to a minimum. Only the mountain lion and fisher effectively prey on porcupines. Fisher numbers are very low in this region, making it an unlikely culprit, but mountain lion numbers have increased in recent years and could be at least partly responsible for the decline. Williams doubts predation by mountain lions could be “limiting� because it didn’t happen in the past when both lion and porcupine populations were high.
Could be a serious disease affecting porcupines? Perhaps, but who knows about porcupine diseases? Nobody. Porcupines are big rodents, so a rodent disease could be having a major impact. If so, it could easily be too late before we find out what it is.
The point is, of course, we have no clue why we’re losing the porcupine, and we aren’t even trying to find out. Wildlife managers want to find out, but getting funding for an “unprotected, non-managed� species is very difficult. High-profile charismatic megafauna like bears, elk, bighorn sheep, and wolves tend to suck up all the limited research money.
Gniadek, for one, stresses about something like this happening right before our eyes, and nobody really notices or cares. “It’s scary to think that this might be happening with other species, too,� he notes. “I say the national parks have a strong responsibility to protect all species, but it’s hard to do it if you don’t know how the populations are doing, and we can’t know that if we don’t do some type of monitoring. We need to be out there looking and be aware of what’s going on.�
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Comments
Ready for the layman's two cents worth? I lived in the Bitterroot for 16 years, and my dogs got quilled up almost every spring. When I was ranch manager northwest of Stevensville, one of my hands did kill a porky (on my recommendation) that just hung around, girdling trees and slapping quills in the dogs-but I've never killed another one (my dogs have--the vet bill runs about $85-$100), and would not. But it seems that you are not aware of the general hatred of porkys among western humans in the past century or longer. I guess it is because they girdle trees--but I remember, many years back, reading an elk hunting story in one of the local papers, where a man and his wife saw a bull elk and a porky at the same time, and described their dilemma--'how to get the bull and still not let that porcupine get away!' I started paying attention after that, and found that most of the old timers whacked them out whenever they saw them. The exception were
old timers who explained (I think Tom Cahill wrote about this too) that killing porkys was bad because if you were ever starving in the winter you could not save yourself by eating snowshoe hares--too lean--but you could kill a porky and get enough fat to get you up and moving.
It is my opinion that mountain lions kill quite a few porkys--I've seen porky hides hung over branches in the Sapphires, with lion tracks below the tree and in the area (I'd like to see how the lion does that). Not much else that I know of preys on them. But I think that there is more indiscriminate killing of porkys by people than you might imagine.
Lest I seem callous about porkys and their fate at the hands of my various dogs over the years, I'm not callous-I like a porky pretty good, hope they prosper, wish them well. They are truly 'other' in my opinion, creatures beyond comprehension, their little jet black eyes reflecting ...what? They are relatively unassailable but don't have anything like the demeanor of a prairie rattler or a grizz or a badger.
My last two cents worth- my dog killed a porky last spring over here near Augusta, and I saw three or four this year--including one right in Great Falls. I was also approached by a hurting horse near my house who turned out to have a face--nose and lip- full of long quills, which I couldn't do anything about, since he about tried to kill me when I touched one of them.
Let me know sometime what the researchers find out.
Hal
FYI, my Scottish terrier has been quilled, but neither of my border collies ever had an unpleasant encounter. My late, lamented border collie, Angus, stood nose-to-nose with a large old porcupine for nearly forty-five minutes one day while my family and I watched in amazement. Angus clearly wasn't bothering the porcupine, which didn't even have its quills up. They were just enjoying some sort of inter-species communion. It was a sight to behold. One of my fondest memories, both of the dog and of my life here in Northern Idaho.