JACKSON, Wyo. — It’s officially breeding season for porcupines, the second largest rodent in North America behind the beaver, when these typically solitary animals engage in a unique courtship ritual critical to the mislabeled predator’s unprotected status.
According to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD), porcupines occupy habitat in every part of the state. This includes woodlands, grasslands and desert environments. However, despite their presence in a vast range of landscapes including Jackson Hole, porcupines are not frequently visible because of their nocturnal nature. The National Park Service (NPS) recommends identifying bare patches on trunks and branches for the best chance to spot porcupines, who can be sleeping above the ground on branches or in hollows.
While porcupines are best known for their nearly 30,000 quills, which the NPS emphasizes aren’t used as projectiles but instead stand up on end and easily detach upon contact with a predator, porcupines are also notable for their unique courtship call. This call sounds somewhat similar to a stark raptor or donkey shriek and somewhat similar to a screeching, unhappy cat.
Unlike other local mating rituals where the males make the call like with the Greater Sage Grouse, elk or moose, the porcupine females use vocalization to invite surrounding males to come compete for attention. Professor and porcupine expert Dr. Uldis Roze confirms in his book Porcupines: The Animal Answer Guide that the males will then fight each other with their teeth and quills until the female allows access to one of them. However, the winning male will have to continue to defend his position as long as the female is in estrus.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game also notably points out that the winning, breeding male will shower the female with his urine to find out if she’s ready to mate. If she’s not, she’ll leave, but if she is ready she’ll cover the sharp quills on her backside with her tail to allow the male to approach her closely from behind without injury.
A female porcupine only produces one offspring per year, known as a porcupette, and that’s after a seven month gestation period.
“For a rodent, that gestation period is an eternity,” Kevin Taylor, lead faculty with Wildlife Expeditions of Teton Science Schools, tells Buckrail.
The long gestation period along with the low birth rate puts porcupine populations at a disadvantage when faced with unregulated killing. Wyoming law categorizes porcupines as a Predatory Animal, which means they can be taken without a license at any time of year, despite the fact that they are not actually predators. Primarily classified as herbivores, porcupines have occasional scavenger tendencies to consume meat from already dead carcasses but do not behave as an animal that naturally preys on others. Jackrabbits are also listed by Wyoming law as a Predatory Animal.
“The reason is that it allows landowners to remove animals that cause damage on private land,” WGFD Public Information Specialist Mark Gocke explains to Buckrail. “Porcupines can do damage to trees, primarily. So a landowner can take care of a problem without breaking the law.”
While porcupines are not considered threatened or endangered, the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute confirms that hunting by humans has caused populations to decline. The Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation’s most recent Wildlife Vehicle Collision (WVC) Report shows that porcupines are also susceptible to getting hit by cars, with the species experiencing the sixth-most WVCs in Teton County, Wyoming, with two deaths already in 2023.
