The sweetest animal in the forest

We had been coursing the spruce and poplar thickets for 20 minutes, doing our best to keep the bell on Winchester's collar in earshot. Still a young dog, his blood comes from a splendid line of big-running English setters and he hadn't learned to stay close in thicker cover yet.

The bell was a big one and my old ears could track it out 400 yards or so. It was faint in the distance when it went silent. Christine and I quickened our pace, anxious to get to him quickly as he was not yet rock solid in his points.

Perhaps 100 yards out, we still couldn't see him when the bell went off as if he were headed to a fire, except it didn't go anywhere and then it went silent again. A bit strange. Getting close, we saw his setter tail appear first above the brush, and then the rest of him, head up, locked in a point.

Quartering across close in front of him, I glanced over and his muzzle, in an instant, told the story of the strange bell soundings. Protruding from his nostrils and lower lip was a collection of porcupine quills.

Finding the porcupine

"No bird," I told Winchester. Christine came up and knelt beside him while I dug for the pliers in my hunting vest. The next few minutes were anything but fun for all concerned but we removed the quills without further bloodshed, and Winchester's strain to get back to hunting suggested he was no worse for the wear.

Removing the quills did a fair job of mangling them, and I wanted a memento for his first porcupine encounter, so I grabbed a small branch and went to where he had been pointing. Finding the little fellow burrowed under a deadfall, I gave him a gentle tap on the butt, which produced a half dozen pristine quills for Winchester's keepsake box. We continued hunting.

Telling this story to bird hunters who hunt with dogs often elicits the response: Why didn't you kill the porcupine? It's a common sentiment that always surprises me.

Porcupines are delightful creatures. They mean no harm to anyone or anything. Watching them go about their daily business of foraging for food or searching for a mate reveals they are simple creatures who are very shy and just want to be left alone. They plod along; their physical makeup does not allow them a reasonable chance to escape danger by fleeing. So when attacked, their sole defense is their sharp quills. Who can blame them when a dog sticks its nose where it doesn't belong?

A couple of weeks ago we were walking along a willow-choked creek bottom covered in hard overflow ice and came across one of the little fellows sunning himself in the middle of the frozen slab. As we approached, he turned his prickly butt to us and headed toward the far bank in his best attempt at a run. When he got to the snow on the creek bank, his big feet held him up rather well, sort of like a lynx.

Shy critters

Years ago one spring morning, I arrived a couple of hours before everyone else at the office building where I worked. Walking up the sidewalk to the alcove at the entrance, I spotted a large brown object near the door. Walking up close, the object identified itself with a turn that revealed a big old porcupine butt, quills prominent and warning of my trespass to his seclusion.

We chatted for a bit, and he agreed to move on. He ambled across the yard and disappeared around the corner of another old building nearby. This sequence was repeated several times over the next couple of weeks until one day I followed the little fellow and discovered he was going under the backside of the old building. Perhaps this was his home.

It turned out a couple of weeks later that he, in fact, was a she; I arrived to see her walking across the lawn with a baby porcupine in tow. There have been many times I have regretted not having a camera but that moment ranks in the top five. There are just not many creatures more adorable than a baby porcupine. (Google "baby porcupine eating a pumpkin" and you'll see what I mean.)

Once I started carrying a camera wherever I go, I've had numerous opportunities that would seem to produce great photos. Except porcupines are so shy. Getting close to them is easy, it isn't like they can run away from anything.

But posers they are not. For the most part they'll give you great shots of their butts as they present it toward you every time you try and get a good face shot. Evidently, they have no burning desire to be on a Facebook post.

What prompted this topic this time of year is the sudden appearance of many of these gentle creatures dead on the highway. While statistics aren't kept on the numbers, porcupine road kills probably exceed, by a wide margin, moose deaths in vehicle collisions.

For lack of a better explanation, porcupines love salt and it seems like they seek the residual salt from winter highway sanding. Porcupines have good noses, and they probably smell the salt and amble into roadways in search of it.

September is another time when they often appear dead on the road. That's their breeding season and they are on the move, searching for a mate. Theirs is an unusual breeding cycle in that there is eight-to-12-hour window of time when the female is receptive. In the porcupine world it would seem there is no greater social sin than poor timing, and they aren't paying a lot of attention to traffic as they try to meet the deadline nature has thrown down.

A while back someone posted on social media of killing a porcupine for the quills, and I thought they are lying dead all over the place, why not just use one of them. Some people do eat them as a choice and being an unclassified animal, the season is open all year and there is no limit. Nothing more than a big stick is required to take a porcupine, and a survival situation seems like one of the few reasons to kill one of these delightful animals.

Winchester learned quick

I can understand taking them when they have taken up residence near a home, which can lead to a dog coming home loaded with quills every week. Quill removal isn't always as easy as Winchester's experience, and vet bills get rather expensive. But chance encounters while hunting, not so much.

Some bird dog folks train dogs to avoid porcupines and some have reported success. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block is the general lack of porcupines available for training purposes. And some dogs will repeatedly attack them no matter what. Fortunate for us, Winchester learned on his first round, and now he just points them or ignores them.

We come across porcupines a couple of times a year while wandering the country and every encounter brightens the day. A world without porcupines, at least in this old hunter's opinion, would not be a better place.

Steve Meyer of Soldotna is lifelong Alaskan and an avid shooter. He writes every other week about guns and Alaska hunting. Contact Steve at oldduckhunter@outlook.com