The porcupine continues his nightly ramble down our road, foraging for bulbs under the lawn and leaving craters for the unwary to twist an ankle in. For those who have no fences around their properties, the compost heap is the best place to detract him from your bulbs, and as long as you are not actually wanting to use the compost, is the ideal way to dispose of most kitchen scraps.
Porcupines eat a wide variety of foods, even bread, and you will soon learn what they don't like - carrot tops, onions, pineapple leaves. I've taken to throwing our scraps under the hedge, far from our boundary, as I have had enough bad porcupine experiences to last a lifetime, as regular readers of this blog will know. I reckon as long as he is in the area, I may as well occupy him at a safe distance.
He recently dug up a little patch of wild freesias that I had planted 30 years ago and only flowered this spring for the first and now last time.
My parents live up on the mountainside in Clovelly and have had tremendous problems with porcupines over the years. A raiding pair developed a taste for bark and systematically stripped the lower trunk of an enormous syringa tree in the middle of the garden, progressing to the root system and chewing off the tender root bark, scattering soil far and wide. Eventually the tree just gave up and died. Undeterred, the porcupines simply moved on to the fig tree, which succumbed shortly thereafter.
Despite resorting to feeding them with crates of leaves from the local supermarkets, they still make a detour to the bougainvillea from time to time and all bulbs have to be kept in containers on tables. Doubtless they will soon learn to climb.
Although they cause widespread destruction in our gardens, I'm sure we would miss them if they disappeared - they are, after all, part of the ecosystem and have as much right to be here as we do.
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