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I had my first ever encounter with a porcupine as a teenager way back in 1958. One evening I was tracking a wood pigeon in a nook of the jungle outside Munnar when I heard a persistent rattling in the undergrowth near me. Losing sight of the pigeon in dense foliage, I espied an ungainly creature emerge cautiously from the shrubbery, the black-and-white quills on its back menacingly erect. Having heard the popular myth that a porcupine can shoot out its quills, I fled. Indeed, the sight of a porcupine with its full armour of spines flared out can be quite unsettling to the uninitiated.
Today, even if one doesn’t get to see the porcupine in the wild in Munnar, there’s plenty of evidence of its presence — in the form of its quills that fall off as it wends its way through tea fields and tangled undergrowth. In those distant days we boys loved to collect these to use them as tips for our arrows or to stick them jauntily in our caps, though superstitious elders often warned us that a porcupine’s quills brought misfortune to the home. The only ‘misfortune’ we dreaded was being shot in the fundament with an arrow tipped with a sharp quill while playing “Cowboys and Red Indians”. Assuredly, nothing could be more painful.
During the British era in Munnar, the porcupine was regarded as vermin since it is destructive to tea bushes with its marked tendency to gnaw away at its roots, leaving them damaged and exposed. A reward of 3 rupees was offered for each porcupine produced dead. Tea estates employed trappers who set snares on jungle paths frequented by the rodents who, incidentally, are known to be creatures of habit, preferring to stick to tried and tested routes as it were.
September is the time for porcupines to forage in the Jhum fields of Karbi Anglong hills in Assam, and for the Tiwa people to declare Porcupine season. | Ritu Raj Konwar
As a teenager, I once accompanied a trapper who was out checking his snares or ‘kannis’ as these are known in Tamil. We found a large dead porcupine securely noosed in one, the strand of wire taut around its bristly body. It had literally walked into the noose while foraging and had probably died of starvation, since porcupines are known to feed through the night, lying up in their burrows during the day.
In those days the porcupine was often hunted by locals with dogs, its flesh being prized as a delicacy and even as an aphrodisiac by some. Unsurprisingly, many a dog returned from such forays injured and sometimes resembling a pincushion. In fact, I recall a tragic occasion when a worker’s dog limped back, whimpering, from an unsuccessful porcupine hunt with one of its eyes spiked by a quill.
It has been documented, notably by Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson, that tigers and panthers have turned man-eaters after having been grievously injured by a porcupine that they tried to prey on. Yet the rodents are seldom known to be aggressive, preferring to scurry away at the sight of humans or predators to the safety of dense underbrush or tea fields.
The porcupine lives in natural caves or burrows which are excavated with its long claws that are ideal for this purpose. Nocturnal in its habits and largely herbivorous, it subsists on plants, shoots, bulbs, fruits and tubers, besides insects and small vertebrates. Apart from the tea bush, the porcupine is known to be destructive to vegetable gardens and agricultural crops.
Besides humans, among the porcupine’s main predators are the big cats, wild dogs and crocodiles. Though listed by the IUCN as being of “Least Concern”, the porcupine rightly continues to be a protected species whose habitat is fast disappearing due to urbanisation and the indiscriminate use of pesticides.
The porcupine’s fearsome arsenal of quills is an effective deterrent to predators. These form a protective armour around the rodent, which it raises when it feels threatened. The long quills on its neck and shoulders are flexible while the smaller ones are sharp and rigid.
In tackling a predator, the porcupine is known to forcefully drive its spiny posterior into the attacker by literally backing into it with all the strength it can muster. In the process it virtually stabs the predator with its needle-sharp spines, often incapacitating it. Contrary to popular belief, the porcupine does not shoot out its quills at attackers.
Much like the dreaded rattlesnake, the porcupine has its own unique warning system to scare off predators. It vibrates the hollow quills at the base of its tail to produce a warning rattling sound when threatened or alarmed.
A most intriguing creature, the porcupine was recently in the news when 9 of the 11 rodents at the Trivandrum Zoo in Kerala clawed and gnawed their way out of their enclosure, through the concreted flooring reinforced with steel mesh, on no less than two occasions, confounding the zoo authorities. Besides being a highly prickly customer, it’s probably the hardest gnawing rodent around as well. It doesn’t have just spines; it has spine.
