By Kit M. (Bowdoinham Community School, Grade 4)
This amazing animal is very interesting - covered not with miniature spears, only tough hair that sticks together! When I found out that this was true, I couldn't help but want to learn more about them.
These so-called "quills" are nothing more than tough, fused hairs. It turns out that they cannot "shoot" their quills, but they come out easily. If they come out in an animal's skin, they can work into the flesh and cause pain, or even death when it comes right through heart or liver or whatever. Porcupines only use their quills in self defense. If an attacker comes too close to the porcupine, he will stamp his feet as a warning signal. Then he will curl up into a ball.
But if the animal persists, he will swing his quilled tail at the attacker, telling the attacker he won't get a meal so easily.
These huge rodents are no different than hamsters or gerbils, except for size and coat. All rodents' jaws have huge incisors. Made for grinding and gnawing, these teeth are the difference between rodents and the other mammals. If the incisors are not used enough, they can grow to be too big and cause the animal to die because either they have worked their way back into the skull or have blocked off the animal's food supply.
Porcupines are 2-3 feet long, weighing 20-40 pounds. Their quills are 2-3 inches. Their color is usually black to gray to orange. Female porcupines only have one baby, born in the spring. The babies are black, and they don't have quills yet.
Porcupines live all over the globe, in places such as Australia, going by the name Echidna, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and North America. There are only one kind of quilled animal in North America: North American porcupines. These are part of the New World Porcupines (North/South America.) Porcupines in the southern hemisphere like it hot. European, Asian and North American porcupines can stand it either way.
Our North American porcupines are the only quilled animal in the hemisphere. Often they are wrongly called Hedgehogs, an Eastern Hemisphere cousin. Even though you can't see it on the outside, all of them have coarse black fur.
Porcupines are herbivores . This means that they don't eat meat. Their diet includes bark, flower and plant buds.
All in all, porcupines are very interesting critters. However you wouldn't want to mess with them unless you want a nose full of quills!
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