Porcupine Pursuits with Uldis Roze

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

Uldis Roze: The first snow is usually what drives a porcupine into a den. They can choose a hollow tree, they can choose a root mass with an opening in the bottom, or they can choose a rock den, and Catskill porcupines are choosing dens that are rock dens, and those dens are high up in the mountain.

Brett Barry: What do you know about the North American porcupine other than its propensity for plywood and its ability to shoot quills? Just kidding, and spoiler alert: porcupines cannot, I repeat, cannot shoot their quills. Uldis Roze is the world's foremost porcupine expert, and he, like the porcupines he studies, makes his home right here in the Catskills. On today's "Kaatscast," everything you never thought you'd want to know about our resident prickly rodent, the North American porcupine.

Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is brought to you by Ulster Savings Bank with locations throughout the Mid-Hudson Valley, including right here in Phoenicia and Woodstock. Call (866) 440-0391 or visit them at ulstersavings.com. Member FDIC Equal Housing Lender; and by the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie Counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

Uldis Roze: I'm Uldis Roze, Professor Emeritus at Queens College and a Catskill resident since 1970. We bought just land. The land was... was an abandoned farm. It was 180 acres, and we bought 80 acres of that, and... and it was all wilderness, all... all woods, and we built a cabin here, and we've stayed here ever since.

Brett Barry: What was your experience with porcupines before coming to the Catskills?

Uldis Roze: Zero, but... but porcupines are... are universally recognized, you know, French children when they do the alphabet: "A" is arbora and "C" is cheval [horse] and "P" is porc-épic [porcupine].

Brett Barry: It comes from the French, right? Porcupine: spiky pig?

Uldis Roze: Yes, and it's... I really don't like the word "spiky pig." I would like to call it "spiky bear" because it climbs trees like a bear and it behaves kind of like a bear. It investigates its environment and travels over the... over the land and... and sleeps in a den. Unlike pigs, pigs don't have dens. Bears do, so I... I would like to... to call him "ursus spine" for bear... bear spine.

Brett Barry: Well, if anyone can rename it, I think you have the right. What was your career leading up to your interest in porcupines?

Uldis Roze: Well, I... I did not have a natural transition into mammalogy. I was trained as a chemist and became a biochemist [a study of the chemistry of living organisms]. When I got my degree in... in... in '64, I got on the phone and I called the City University because I wanted to come to New York, and I was interested in the Arts of New York. First, I called Brooklyn College. They had no jobs open. I called Queens College. They said, "Sure, you've got a job," and Queens College did not have a biochemistry department. It had a biology and a chemistry, and I had to choose, and I chose biology, and the lab function involved field trips, and one of the field trips involved driving out to New Jersey to the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, and this... this was amazing to me. I've... I've grown up in urban environments, and the... the Pine Barrens have peat bogs. You can walk out on a... on a quaking bog. Your feet go up and down, and every once in a while a student falls through and comes back in the bus wet, and you have orchids—amazing orchids, amazing ferns—and the experience seduced me. I... I became interested in... in nature, not... not so much the chemical part of nature, but the chemistry part has... has been... been a help.

Brett Barry: And as a new resident in the Catskills, your first interaction with porcupines was one of them being a bit of a nuisance, which I think is pretty common because they do kind of eat things we don't want them to eat.

Uldis Roze: Right, the cabin we built was... was built of plywood. I remember our first night sleeping as homeowners in our own cabin, and we were just going to bed, and I... I heard a terrible grinding noise outside, and I went out, and there was a porcupine eating our house. The brand new house was being eaten. I was enraged and found a stick, and... and I was going to hit the porcupine, and... and, I lost the stick and I lost my glasses, and the porcupine got away. Afterwards I wondered, where does that porcupine live? Where did it come from? I did some reading, and there wasn't much... much information on this, and I realized that this was a subject that could use more investigation.

Brett Barry: And so it became a subject that was and is your life's work, right?

Uldis Roze: It is. You know, the reason people stay with a subject is that it offers a continual path of discovery that there's always something new, something that you didn't know. The porcupine has been that. You discover one thing, you clear up one question, and there's another question, and it's... it's been in a lifetime of... of studying with literally hundreds of... of questions unanswered. In my book, I list not only things that we know about porcupines. I list the questions, which we don't know, and... and there are generations of... of study left.

Brett Barry: I'm going to ask you a question that might lead to a really long answer. You say in your book that naturalists had been studying porcupines for 250 years. What have you been able to add to that body of research?

Uldis Roze: The things that I've added have been dealing with... with a salt drive, dealing with family structure, dealing with defensive mechanisms of the porcupine... one of the defensive mechanisms of the porcupine is... is to smell terrible. The porcupine, when it's in danger, warns you first that it warns you by clacking its teeth, so it's an auditory warning. It warns you by spreading its quills. That's... it's a black-and-white contrast like a skunk's. The quills of a... of a porcupine are fluorescent. They... they glow more brightly than a... a plain white paint would... would glow, and they produce a terrible smell, and this smell is... is produced by the so-called rosette, the back of the porcupine, which... which has no hairs. A porcupine's body covering has... has three layers. It has the... the hairs, which are kind of a downy, feathery underlying area. It has the guard hairs, which can be erected and which function as part of the warning collar, and it has the quills. The quills of the rosette are able to spread the smell. They have tips with barbs that are longer than usual that pick up the... the smell and waft it in the air, and if you're in a room, I've had a porcupine in the room, and you can't... can't stay in the room with the porcupine. It... it really has a strong smell, so I was able to... to determine the structure of that molecule, and it's... it's a... it's a simple structure. It's a 10-carbon molecule, which looks like the letter P. 10 carbons end-to-end, which are linked the way that P is linked at the top, and the name of the molecule is R-delta-decalactone. There's nothing in the forest that smells like a porcupine. Only this very specialized, small molecule is porcupine, and that should warn predators that they're in for trouble if they go any further.

Brett Barry: So you've identified the molecule that gives the porcupine its unique smell, which means perfumists could... could replicate that if they wanted to, right?

Uldis Roze: As a matter of fact, they could.

Brett Barry: Not that they want to?

Uldis Roze: Not that they want to. For Halloween, you could do that, but after we determined the structure just for fun. I ordered a supply of that molecule of that chemical. There's a company, Sigma Chemical Company, which sells chemicals, you know, thousands of different chemicals, and a little bottle came, a little brown bottle came in the mail. I opened it, porcupine.

Brett Barry: Wow, what would someone other than you be doing with that chemical?

Uldis Roze: You mean the only other person I can think of doing that is a porcupine, and it would be to frighten you or to deter you. Your eyes start to tear, you might start coughing, you really don't want to stay around that molecule.

Brett Barry: So Sigma Chemical Company was probably scratching their heads when an order came in for it?

Uldis Roze: Well, but they had it.

Brett Barry: Yeah. Let's talk about when they do feel threatened. There's... those warning signs, the clacking teeth, raising the quills, but at a certain point, if... if a predator or human gets too close, they'll whack you with those quills, right, and detach them into your skin.

Uldis Roze: If you had to choose a defense mechanism, what would you do? Would you choose your hair to defend yourself? And those are hairs, but they're hairs [which] have grown thick, so they're stiff, and those are hairs [which] have barbs, and the barbs are one way, and those barbs make it very easy to enter the skin.

Brett Barry: Easy to go in, but not to come out.

Uldis Roze: Easy to go in, but not to come out, and the whole body is protected. The neck is protected, and dogs and coyotes first go for the neck, and they get a mouthful of quills, and if a human being tries to get them, they use their tail, and then they keep the tail pointed like a sword and turning the body so the tail is always towards the predator, and that tail is muscular. It's as thick at the base as the human wrist, and it's not only muscular. It can move faster than you can follow it with your eyes, and that's where the fiction comes from that porcupines throw their quills. You know when one moment you have no quills... the next moment you have quills, and you didn't see those quills enter your body. Those quills came from the tail, and the tail drives the quills. It's a swat, and that gives them force that gives... gives force to the impact.

Brett Barry: Uldis Roze has firsthand experience with that impact. In order to study porcupines, Roze has to catch them first, and before he devised his porcupine house and igloo cooler technique, which you'll hear about in just a moment, he engaged in riskier methods like following a porcupine up a tree with a wire mesh trap in hand.

Uldis Roze: I was up the mountain, and I was following a male porcupine, and I saw the... the male climb a low tree, and I said, "Well, that's not very high." I can... I can climb that, and so I was climbing the tree with this wire mesh, and the porcupine was above me, and I was trying to reach the porcupine, and the porcupine was trying to reach me, and it swatted me with a tail, and there was just an agonizing feeling in my upper arm, and I immediately had to jump out of the tree, and I ripped off my shirt, and I could see quills sticking out, and I pulled out the big quills, and there was a bump. There was no quill. There was a bump in the skin, and that was a quill that had gone inside. The quill was in me. You know, I... I... I... there's nothing I could do, so I had to make my way slowly down the mountain with... with a paralyzed arm. I had to drive a shift car. You know, this was a... we had to shift, and I couldn't use my right arm to... to shift. I had to use my left arm to shift and drove back to New York City, and I noticed that as I was driving, the... the quill seemed to have moved. You know, it wouldn't, it wasn't, it wasn't up where it was before it did. It was lower down in my... my upper arm, and two days later I was teaching, and... and in the morning I could feel something scratching inside my shirt. When I went back to my office after the lab, I took off the shirt, and there... there was no quill there. There... there was a little red spot, and the quill was... was in the shirt. It had come out, and it had come out without any pain, you know, totally painless. You know, if... if... if I had a wood splinter in there, it would just blow up. It would have an infection. Does that mean that the porcupine quills have antibiotics? And they do, so... so that's... that was a happy outcome of a painful introduction.

Brett Barry: It's amazing, so if… if an animal attacks a porcupine, the porcupine really just wants to deter the animal. Deterring it with those quills is a quick way to do that, but do you find that the animal recovers because of the antibiotic properties of the quills?

Uldis Roze: I should think so. You know, if those quills were dirty, like a sea urchin, quills are dirty. That animal would blow up. So why does a porcupine behave so nicely to its enemies? Well, it's because porcupines fall out of trees. Every once in a while, they... they do fall, and as they fall, they're thrashing around and... and quilling themselves, and... and it's good then to... to have quills that you can pull out without infecting yourself, and porcupines can pull out their quills. They... they use the palms of their paws. Porcupines pull out the quills, and it's over.

Brett Barry: So a lot of your research has been about salt consumption or their need for salt. They eat leaves and bark, and I guess there's an abundance of potassium that needs to be balanced by salt?

Uldis Roze: Right.

Brett Barry: Is that unique to porcupines?

Uldis Roze: Not at all. All herbivores are all animals that feed on plants... need extra salt. They need salt in their diet, which doesn't come from the diet, and they all get the salt in different ways. A cow gets it from the farmer. The farmer puts out a salt lick. A moose eats water lilies. Water lilies have a high concentration of sodium, and porcupines will do that if they have a chance, but porcupines are rodents. They get their food by... by gnawing, so I was interested in the possibility of... of attracting porcupines, and to attract a porcupine, I... I built a structure that I know they eat a house, and it's... it's a small house. It's 10x16. I placed salted wood around the periphery of the house, and this was in the early 1980s, and a week later a porcupine was coming to gnaw on that salt house, and a deer couldn't do this because a deer doesn't have the incisors. It lacks the gnawing capacity of the porcupine, so only porcupines would come to this house, and I knew there were porcupines in the woods, and I had found them by accident, but it's hard work, and it's unpredictable, and you can spend a day walking through a forest and never see a porcupine, but here I was making the porcupines come to me, and I was using salt as an attractant, and it was attracting only porcupines, actually attracting also flying squirrels. Flying squirrels are also rodents, and they also eat plants, and they also need salt, but the amount of salt a flying squirrel needs is minuscule compared to what a porcupine needs.

Brett Barry: So you built a house just for the porcupines?

Uldis Roze: Exactly.

Brett Barry: And when they get there, does that give you the ability to study them observationally, or is there something about what they're doing to the... the slats of salt that you've put around the house that's giving you some information?

Uldis Roze: What the salt house does is it allows me to capture the porcupine. To capture the porcupine, you can find out many things. You can find out what kind of parasites it's carrying. You can find out whether it's a male or a female. If it's a female, is it lactating? Is it pregnant? If it's a male, is it an adult male? How much does it weigh? Is... is it a comfortable weight? Is it starving? So you have a lot of information from a brief examination of a porcupine, and I never do anything more than do that examination and let them go back in the woods.

Brett Barry: Which begs the question, how do you examine a porcupine?

Uldis Roze: Ah, ha ha ha. A couple of years ago, a veterinarian could buy a substance called ketamine. It's a gentle anesthetic, and it's totally safe. It knocks you out for about 20 minutes. You recover, and you can go on. Unfortunately, ketamine became a favorite of people. It's now a controlled substance. You can't buy it. You can't get it, so... so it's... it's closed that avenue of research, but I was using ketamine. The porcupine is outside the salt house. I'm inside the salt house. I hear the gnawing. It's a very loud rasping sound. I go out, and I'm carrying an igloo. An igloo is a cooler with a closeable top. I go up to the porcupine, and the porcupine, if it's a first-time porcupine, is not afraid of me. Porcupines stand their ground. I go up to it. I open the igloo. I close the igloo over the porcupine, and the porcupine is in the igloo, and it's... the size of the igloo is the size of a porcupine, so the igloo prevents the tail from slapping. That's the most dangerous part of the porcupine. You can then cautiously open the... the top and... and do a ketamine injection, and you have the porcupine available for examination for 20 minutes.

Brett Barry: Let's talk a little bit about porcupines as an animal. You say they're a rodent. How else are they classified, and what makes them unique in the animal world?

Uldis Roze: Well, a porcupine is a rodent. You've maybe seen porcupine photos in their face. You see yellow teeth sticking out, and the porcupine isn't smiling. Its mouth is closed. Those yellow incisors are yellow on the outside because the enamel is impregnated with iron salts, and that makes the enamel especially hard. The inner part of the tooth is dentine. That's a softer kind of structure, and so when the porcupine uses its incisors, the back wears away more quickly than the front, and that creates a chiseled shape to the teeth so the teeth are very sharp. You know, you can eat wood all your life, and... and the teeth never wear out because they're growing continually. They don't have roots like our molars and... and our... our incisors. They grow from the skull and... and continue to renew themselves, and porcupines can do this, and rodents are a large order of mammals. About 40% of all mammals are rodents. You know, you have squirrels, you have beavers. Beaver is the New York state rodent. We're the Beaver State because the beaver is the biggest rodent in New York State. Porcupine is number two. Porcupine is behind the beaver that tells you how the animal eats. If you close your teeth and make a chewing motion and put your finger to your... the side of your jaw, you'll feel a muscle contracting. That's the masseter muscle. That's... that's the muscle that we use to chew. In a porcupine, the jaw doesn't clamp down or move slightly sideways. It goes back and forth. It's forward and backward, and that's a grinding motion, so the porcupine teeth have a grinding surface, which can grind up hard materials that you need this special method of chewing. Okay, so it's a hystricognathous rodent.

Brett Barry: Uldis went on to explain some of the differences between Old World and New World porcupines. Old World porcupines are 40 million years old. New World porcupines: only 30 million, and how an African porcupine allegedly rafted to South America to establish that New World population—it's a long story. Anyway, the South American porcupines have prehensile tails. They can use them to hang from trees eating leaves and fruit, but their familiar North American cousins adapted those tails for other purposes.

Uldis Roze: The New World porcupine does not have a prehensile tail. It has a muscular tail, and this muscular tail is its weapon. It's like the sword of a swordsman. It's what it uses to defend itself. If it's attacked by a predator, it turns its tail towards the predator and uses the tail. That tail is also an assist in climbing and descending from trees. The top of the tail has quills. The bottom of the tail has bristles. The bristles dig into the bark of the tree and prevent backsliding.

Brett Barry: At this point in the interview, and maybe it was all this talk about those talented tails, I wondered.

Uldis Roze: Are they monogamous? No way! Porcupines mate only once a year... end of September, beginning of October, and during this time, the female starts producing a sex attractant in her urine, so she's up in the tree, and she releases a stream of urine, and the urine falls on... on the branches and spatters, and you have a cloud of... of urine, and that cloud carries this attractant pheromone, and it attracts males. It attracts male porcupines, and males far away head upwind to the source of that porcupine, and if more than one male arrives, there's a battle, and the winner of the battle is the one who stays with the female, and... and there may be three or four porcupines arriving, and they'll battle it out until the biggest, strongest porcupine wins, so the female is selecting the biggest, strongest porcupine to be her mate. When the battle is over, the male climbs up into the tree and starts guarding the female from other males coming up the tree. She becomes receptive. She's ovulating, and the two will then descend the tree to the bottom and mate, and the female will raise her tail so that she has the bristles facing the male instead of the quills. That's it for the year for the female. It's not it for the male. That male can go on to other females, so a male can have several matings if it's a strong enough male and old enough male. A female mates once, and she chooses the strongest and the biggest.

Brett Barry: And then the female has one?

Uldis Roze: Female has a single offspring. There's never been a report in the literature of a wild porcupine giving birth to twins. I'm talking about North American porcupines. It's a single offspring. It's born in its call. It's born in the amniotic sack, so that the quills of the baby don't injure the mother. When the sack is delivered, the mother eats off the sack to hide all scent marks from predators, and the baby's quills harden, and they're sharp in a matter of hours, and that baby stays with its mother for the first summer of its life.

Brett Barry: The gestation period over the wintertime. How does the porcupine survive a harsh winter, male or female porcupines?

Uldis Roze: So... so the porcupine mating was in the fall. The birth is in the spring, and the gestation period is... is seven months. It's... it's almost as long as a human pregnancy. During that time, two things are happening. First of all, the female is eating poor food. She's not eating the leaves. There are no leaves available in the winter. She's eating the inner bark of tree branches that are close to her den, and she has to subsist on this while she's pregnant, so... so the fetus is growing. That's demanding resources, and... and her food is dwindling. She... she's eating poor food, so the female loses weight. All porcupines lose weight in the winter, but females lose more than males. It's really a... a touch-and-go situation. If a porcupine starves to death, it'll starve in April. It'll starve at the end of the winter when... just before the spring, but nevertheless, the... the female usually survives, and the baby is born, and... and she will spend the next four months with her baby and teach it everything. She will have to teach it to... to climb. She will have to teach it how to select trees. You can't eat just any... any tree. She will teach it everything it needs to... to survive on its own for its first winter of life.

Brett Barry: What are their favorite trees?

Uldis Roze: In the Catskills, there are two favorite trees. One is the linden or basswood. The other is the aspens: bigtooth aspen and quaking aspen, and what's common to the linden and the aspen is that they're pioneer trees. They cannot grow in a closed forest. They need sunlight. They need an opening in the forest, and so there are very few lindens and... and aspens in the forest. Out of a thousand trees, there are just three trees that are edible.

Brett Barry: So they don't hibernate. They continue to feed through the winter, and they just take cover in their den?

Uldis Roze: That's right. The first snow is usually what drives a porcupine into a den. They can choose a hollow tree. They can choose a root mass with an opening in the bottom, or they can choose a rock den, and Catskill porcupines are choosing dens that are rock dens, and those dens are high up in the mountain. It doesn't hibernate. It spends the day hunched up sitting, comes out at night to feed, and then returns to the den. There's another way for a porcupine to... to spend the winter, and that's in hemlock forests. Hemlock forests are green through the winter, and the needles of hemlocks are edible for porcupines. It's... it's again, not an ideal food, but it's as good as the bark of trees near the rock dens, so some porcupines, definitely a minority, spend their winters in hemlock forests. The green of the hemlocks shields them from the open sky, and these porcupines are... tend to be large adult porcupines that have the natural body volume to... to survive like this.

Brett Barry: Do you know what the health of the Catskills porcupine population is?

Uldis Roze: The Catskills porcupine population is under threat, and it's not global warming. It's the fisher. The... the fisher is... is an introduced animal. It was introduced by New York State DEC about 1978 [introduced in Southern Catskills], and it took them 10-15 years to... to reach the Northern Catskills. I've never seen the... the fisher in person, but I've seen their tracks. They have a very unique track. They have five fingers, and it's... it's, like, a bit like a snowshoe. They can travel in the snow better than the porcupine can travel in the snow, and I first saw those tracks about 1996. With the arrival of the fisher, the porcupine faced a serious threat, and I was following that in my salt house. You can estimate the population of your local porcupine group from the amount of salt they consume from the amount of salt chewed, and I could see that the amount of salt being consumed was dropping rapidly, but then after a couple of years, it reversed itself and... and climbed up to a high level, but not as high as before. Between 1996 and... and 2000, there are waves in the... in the salt consumption graph. The high points of the wave represent periods when fishers aren't present, so anyway, this wave function from 1996 to the present shows a reduction of about 30%, and that's remarkably good, so the fisher is here, but the porcupine is holding its own, and I... I believe the reason is that the Catskills porcupine has those rock dents. It... it has that security that it can... it can retreat into, and when the porcupine detects fisher, it can detect the urine of fishers. It can... can detect the anal gland of secretions of fishers. The porcupine stops traveling. It doesn't travel, so it stops coming to the salt house, but it's still there, and it comes back when the fishers disappear.

Brett Barry: What's the lifespan of a wild porcupine?

Uldis Roze: Probably the average is four to six years, but that's... that's because of... of accidents. That's because of... it's not because of old age. I had a porcupine. I... I called her "Squirrel." She was... she was born in 1980, and I trapped her outside her den, and this was one of the dens up in the rock faces of... of Vly Mountain. I kept her under observation for 21 years. She died because she became unable to climb trees. I later did an autopsy, and she had developed severe arthritis, and so she was reduced in the winter to chewing the bark at the bottom of the tree instead of up in the branches where porcupines usually do it, and she was unable to climb up to her rock den up in the mountain, so she chose a den not far from here in a hollow tree, and it was a poor den. It was just an opening in a rotted-out tree, and she froze to death. A wild animal's life is, you know, you don't get Alzheimer's. You don't peter out. You're snuffed out. Something in the environment does it for you.

Brett Barry: So, Squirrel, your—I say your—porcupine, how did you keep tabs on her for that long?

Uldis Roze: I had a radio collar around her neck, and I kept that collar on her neck her whole life, you know, that she was here.

Brett Barry: Do you get emotional?

Uldis Roze: I do. Ha ha ha. You know, it's... it's... it's something that mammalogists warn you against. Don't... don't... don't humanize your animals, and in a sense, I humanize them. I give them all names. They all have names. They're not numbers, and they all have histories, and they're long histories. You know, there's a long lifetime spent in the mountain. I mean a squirrel was the oldest porcupine I... I studied. I had a porcupine called Musa that was the youngest I... I studied. Right... right here on Route 42, there's the Notch. You go through a mountain range with very steep mountainsides. No, no houses. You know, the major source of... of human salt is road salt. In... in the winter, you... you have ice. You have slush. You spread a layer of... of salt over it, and that salt is washed off by the rain, but the salt impregnates all of the deadwood by the side, all the twigs, and... and... and leaves, and the porcupines come for that deadwood, so for... for a Catskill porcupine to... to come from Vly Mountain to... to go down to Route 42 is a long trip, but porcupines along the way, if they have no other option, we'll... we'll do that, and of course when they go down to the highway, the cars kill them, and I was coming down, and there were five dead porcupines in the Notch, and I came to the bottom and there was a baby staggering through the weeds and I had my igloo, I dumped out the food, I went up to the porcupine and captured it. I knew if I didn't do anything, the baby would die, and... and the baby thrived, and I had to teach her how to... how to climb a tree. I had to put her on a low branch, and she would fall, and we... we tried different trees, and she finally found a tree she could climb, and... and she learned how to use her tail to... to descend, and finally, at... at late fall, I... I took her up to the place where porcupine dens are located, and I let her with a radio collar and let her go at the den that Squirrel had used. It's a beautiful den, really, the best den I know, and she was very excited and went in and sniffed around. She didn't want to use the den I gave her. She went on and found another den. First, a very poor den, and then a nice den.

Brett Barry: What was her name?

Uldis Roze: Her name was Musa.

Brett Barry: And you were able to continue to track her through the years?

Uldis Roze: No, she dropped her radio collar. She dropped it at the top of the mountain so she could go down either this direction, which is towards Lexington, or the other direction which is towards Little West Kill, and she must have gone towards Little West Kill, and without a collar, you can't find her.

Brett Barry: Did she consider you mom?

Uldis Roze: Well, she never got excited when I picked her up. You know, I could hold her, and Steph could hold her. My wife could hold her, and we could feed her with a bottle. She would make kind of purring sounds as she was feeding, and she... she knew that, you know, I was... it was not a threat.

Brett Barry: What are the biggest misconceptions or anything that stands out as just a recurring myth or something that people, everyone, should know about a porcupine?

Uldis Roze: We've lost porcupines to hunters. You know, the... the standard reason for shooting is they destroy trees. They don't destroy trees. They eat the leaves of trees, and in the winter, the branches of trees, and it's the upper branches, the small upper branches that they... they feed on, not the trunk. They don't girdle trees, and what they do is create what... what I call witch trees, and those witch trees create openings. They... they create a place where sunlight can reach the ground. They diversify the forest. It... it makes it possible, for instance, for... for linden to grow in that spot or for an aspen to grow in that spot. It's not a destructive animal. It's... it's a... they're intelligent. They are creative. They... they live with their land. They live a long life, and they don't deserve to be shot.

Brett Barry: Will you ever stop researching porcupines?

Uldis Roze: Well, you know, there's the body. The body wants to... to soar in the... and the limbs get tired. I'm... I'm 86, and... and it's... it's hard to climb mountains, and it's hard to go where the porcupines go.

Brett Barry: Would you say it's your spirit animal?

Uldis Roze: Maybe, yeah, I wouldn't mind having a spirit like a porcupine.

Brett Barry: Be sure you're subscribed to our newsletter, where we're publishing a bonus clip of Uldis's porcupine house tour, and if you're interested in the rest of Roze's research, "The North American Porcupine," published by Cornell University Press, would make a fine addition to any Catskill Mountain bookshelf. Briars & Brambles books might be able to help track one down. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599. "Kaatscast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening. Happy Holidays, and please slow down for our salt-loving neighbors! We'll see you next time.