The two young trees on the farm were completely girdled. Removing the bark of a tree all the way around prevents vital nutrients from travelling between roots and shoots. I examined the teeth marks closely; it had to be porcupines. That's too bad, I thought, these trees are going to die.
When we first moved to the farm, porcupines were hard to see. If we saw a quill on the path, we were excited. Since then these rodents have made a big comeback. We began to see them regularly crossing paths, and our camera traps have caught them from every angle. They made big excavations around some trees and gnawed on their roots. This didn't seem to harm the trees in any way. We examined their poop closely: grass seeds, paddy and compacted fibre. But they were clearly eating much more.
The porcupines dug tunnels under our fences, and helped themselves to the kitchen garden. On their way, they nibbled on trees. Over time, almost every tree in our garden began to bear tooth marks, but thankfully, the creatures didn't do a thorough job of girdling the trees. If we placed a monetary value on our plantation, porcupines would be our number one pest. But we didn't mind them. They were just one more creature living off our farm.
A couple of years ago, on our evening walk, the dogs began straining at the leash. They wanted to go into an overgrown area of the farm and since we have a lot of snakes, I was reluctant to unleash them. With threats, treats and taps on their noses, I managed to get them into their kennel and returned to investigate.
A porcupine had been killed, neatly eviscerated, and its quills “plucked”. Blowflies swarmed noisily over the pile of guts. The undergrowth was flattened where the kill had happened. Although I searched through the whole area, there were no other body parts — no head, paws, or skin — lying around. It seemed like the work of a cat, a large one. Who else could it be but our neighbourhood leopard. But wasn't eating a prickly creature like a porcupine dangerous? Didn't Jim Corbett narrate stories of tigers and leopards turning man-eaters after being debilitated by porcupine quills? I asked friends studying these cats if porcupines were part of their normal diet.
M.D. Madhusudan, an ecologist based in Mysore, said he had found dozens of tiger and leopard scats with porcupine quills and hair while working as a research assistant in the early 1990s. So it appeared that the resident prickly rodents were attracting the large cat right into the farm. It should not have come as a surprise, but I did swallow hard when I realised that the cat may have walked past the house.
The next evening, as I walked the dogs near the ‘kill' site, a movement in the distance caught my eye. Two half-grown porcupines scooted into the bamboo hedge. Was it their mother who got killed? Were they now orphaned? I kept watch for several days, but saw no further sign of the young ones.
Last year, a tree planter from Himachal Pradesh enquired if I knew how to deal with porcupines. I protect valued saplings with empty plastic bottles — cut off the top and bottom, slice one side open and slip it around the trunk. For larger trees, I build little fences to porcupine-standing-on-hind-legs height. But you can only do this for some trees, not an entire plantation. Perhaps encouraging leopards would solve the problem, I suggested half-seriously. He was aghast.
I wondered how North American tree planters handled their porcupine problems. This is what I found: recipes for porcupine stew and marinated porcupine chops. When our neighbour saw me fencing a tree, he had recommended something similar. His eyes glistened as he salivated: “They taste just like pork”.
(The author can be reached at janaki@gmail.com)
