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Shoot on sight. Lost a great rabbit beagle because of the fuggers.

I love to see the quills fly when you put a 30-06 through them.

Didn't the women of many American Indian tribes use the quills for decorating clothing, bags, etc.??

Maybe they might still be in the market for some. You boys seeing all those porcupines could make some pocket money.

L.W.

Leanwolf,

Quillwork is waaaaaaay beyond my level of aptitude and ability. It is not easy work! One of the reasons it fell out of vogue with the introduction of glass trade beads. It hung on a while. And you see a mixture of both arts on many items. But beads eventually took over.

My hat is off to those who still do quillwork. My lady friend has a quilled scissor pouch that is to be worn around the neck. Very nice work.

Just the reverse here.

Used to be a regular thing here in the PNW with a bounty offered as a protection mechanism for young timber plantations. A 50-year ago note in our local paper mentions a kid claiming $150 at 50¢ apiece in a single year. Down on one of our refuges one could see 4 or 5 passing the day up in the forks of one of our large but rare cottonwoods. Roadkill was common as were livestock and dog run ins. Many brained everyone they saw on sight. Trout fishing late into an evening, I once vacated the trail out and waded the river, as I nearly stumbled into 2 or 3 walking out in the tall weedy vegetation. Seems odd they've not made it down into the southeastern forest. Could be oak is a bit tough on the teeth.

They were equally common in the mostly conifer timber and out in our sagebrush deserts. I've only seen two in the last decade. One roadkill and one making a successful crossing. An amorous pair emit a huge repertoire of sounds often baffling to those unfamiliar with their character.

They also seem to be salt starved, and one finds sheet metal boxes near remote cow camps and such as a protective shelter for sweat infused horse tack and salt blocks. They're often quite fond of some of the glues used in plywood too, so they'll gnaw off surface layers to get at the goodies beneath.

During long ago graduate school days, I stopped to visit a buddy, and his wife had a dead one on the kitchen table meticulously removing hundreds of quills and sorting them by size and color. Seems tribal folk would pay serious bucks for well-matched sets. Quite noticeable and attractive on their dress ups at their annual pow wows and a strip of hide with that long hair makes a neat mohawk. Haven't tried the hair for fly tying, but I think it would make some dandy streamers for pike and muskie.



Even though we've had a couple dog run ins, we don't personally have it in for them. Not much of a sporting kill, and they're never looking for a fight, so they get a pass when we're out and about. Unlike skunks and raccoons, they don't come in looking to toss camp after we hit the sack. We just get out the Leatherman, tell the dog to sit, and go to work. If I lived in NY though, I'd maybe work up a nice porcupine coat to wear on those crowded subways.

Something in the woods though is extremely adept at taking them on. I once found a fresh hide turned inside out beside a cattle trail and not a sign of any other remains. Don't know if it was a cat, bear, wolverine or what, but something certainly did a surgical class job of skinning the animal and packing off the remains.

As to numbers, I guess some things just wax and wane. Lived here for 10 years before seeing my first skunk in 1992. I asked the local historians about them with responses being they were common into the early 1970's and then disappeared.

Early 1980's we had a jack rabbit explosion. Everything green was consumed, haystacks were undercut and toppled, and one would see a dozen or so running the streets in town when coming out of the movie theater. Out in the desert, one could do a brick of 22LR's in a day without ever moving, and we had hawks and eagles to no end throughout the winter. Now I see about 2 jacks a year and that's with thousands of highway/byway miles and weeks in the bush.

Tough to get a decent porcuie picture, as they mostly want to display their south end.


Have a good one,

Leanwolf,

Quillwork is waaaaaaay beyond my level of aptitude and ability. It is not easy work! One of the reasons it fell out of vogue with the introduction of glass trade beads. It hung on a while. And you see a mixture of both arts on many items. But beads eventually took over.

My hat is off to those who still do quillwork. My lady friend has a quilled scissor pouch that is to be worn around the neck. Very nice work.

A good part of that was the lack of thread. They all had to sewn on with thin strips of buckskin. Cutting that was a major undertaking. Beads could be made with larger holes which greatly sped up the sewing process.