What kind of bark do porcupines eat

Breeding occurs in the fall or early winter and is followed by a day gestation period the longest rodent gestation period. In the spring, the female gives birth to one or two young. They are born with soft quills that harden within hours of birth and their eyes open approximately 10 days later.

After two weeks, they start to eat solid food but they continue to nurse for 4 to 5 months. The average life expectancy of a wild porcupine is 5 to 6 years, while their captive counterparts have been known to live up to 10 years. Porcupines have a benevolent disposition and, unless provoked to defend themselves, they cause no real harm. The primary conflict with porcupines occurs when a person or pet ignores the warning signals and ends up with quills lodged in their skin.

Each porcupine quill has a greasy coating and at the tip is a small, backward projecting barb that serves to work the quills ever deeper into the flesh. Once imbedded, quills cannot easily be pulled out.

Serious injuries can result when humans or animals come in contact with a porcupine if the eyes, mouth or throat are afflicted. Due to a diet low in sodium, porcupines may try to satisfy their dietary need for salt by chewing on wooden structures, tools, and other materials used in outdoor work or recreation. They are attracted to almost any object that has been handled by humans because of the salt found in human sweat.

Porcupines are also attracted to the glue used to bond plywood on wooden structures. Car tires and hoses may also be chewed on for their mineral content or road salt coating. Solutions to conflicts with porcupines include tolerance, fencing and repellents. Attaching a motion sensor to a sprinkler will encourage porcupines to move on as well. Porcupines are especially fond of white pine needles.

During the summer, porcupines consume diverse varieties of other things, such as nuts, herbs, acorns, beechnuts, berries and fruits. Porcupines often have penchants for eating salty substances due to their potassium-packed summer month eating habits. The rodents frequently travel inside of ponds on quests for food with significant sodium levels, including aquatic plants like waterlilies. Porcupines sometimes receive their sodium from chewing on manmade objects such as canoe paddles, tool handles, tires and brake lines.

In the wintertime, it sometimes is rather easy to observe what exactly a porcupine has been eating. If you notice a tree's trunk has been entirely uncovered or that the bark has been taken off all of its branches, a porcupine may just have had a very tasty meal in the spot you're looking at. By using the site, you agree to the uses of cookies and other technology as outlined in our Policy, and to our Terms of Use.

Foundation of a Porcupine Diet The typical porcupine diet consists mostly of plant matter -- think tubers, buds, fruit, bark, carrots, potatoes and cassava -- according to the African Wildlife Foundation. Unlike beavers the regular aquatic kind , which leave very deep marks in trees they have gnawed on, porcupines just chew down to the cambium and leave behind very shallow marks or grooves where their incisors scrape against the wood.

Sadly, the eastern hemlock that is important to the survival of porcupines through winter faces an uncertain future caused by the spread of invasive woolly adelgid beetles which can wipe out entire stands of the tree.

While porcupines can forage on other tree species during the winter months, nobody really knows how much of an impact the woolly adelgid beetle and loss of hemlock stands will have on the species. Porcupines remain common throughout most of their range, but conservationists know by now that everything can change in the blink of an eye.

The future of porcupines, which I promise are an endearing species once you get to know one, depends on us being good stewards of the northern forests on which porcupines absolutely rely.

An adult porcupine fattening up on apples shortly before winter. The shallow gnaw marks on this girdled tree are a telltale sign of porcupine. Even at a young age porcupines are very arboreal. Foraging on the bark of trees, porcupines leave behind shallow gnaw marks.

The Orianne Society.