The West's vanishing porcupines
Porcupines are easy to recognize but hard to find — so elusive, in fact, that few people have ever seen one in the wild.
Emilio Tripp, a wildlife manager and citizen of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, might have been one of the lucky ones. On a nighttime drive with his father in the late 1990s, a ghostly silhouette flashed by the window. “That was my only time I’ve even thought I’ve seen one,” he recalled decades later. Tripp still can’t say for sure whether it was a kaschiip, the Karuk word for porcupine, but he holds on to the memory like a talisman.
The 43-year-old hasn’t seen another porcupine since. Porcupine encounters are rare among his tribe, and the few witnesses seem to fit a pattern: Almost all of them are elders, and they fondly remember an abundance of porcupines until the turn of this century. Now, each new sighting rings like an echo from the past: a carcass on the road; a midnight run-in. The tribe can’t help wondering: Where did all the porcupines go?
“Everyone’s concerned,” Tripp said. “If there were more (observations), we’d hear about it.”
The decline isn’t just in Northern California: Across the West, porcupines are vanishing. Wildlife scientists are racing to find where porcupines are still living, and why they’re disappearing. Others, including the Karuk Tribe, are already thinking ahead, charting ambitious plans to restore porcupines to their forests.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-wests-vanishing-porcupines/