Northern Woodlands

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The North American Porcupine

“The woods are filled with stories, many of them undiscovered,” writes Uldis Roze. “Careful observation of almost any organism is likely to yield surprise and delight.”

For Roze, curiosity about porcupines he encountered on his land in New York’s Catskill Mountains has inspired a passionate, decades-long pursuit to learn everything there is to learn about the spiky rodent. The North American Porcupine, recently released in a second edition, summates these efforts.

Alas, The North American Porcupine seems unlikely to show up on this fall’s “nature & outdoors” bestseller lists. In keeping with its subject animal, the book presents a forbidding exterior. Although the jacket includes an attractive color photo, the font, format, and plain title combine to create a college textbook “read-this-it’s-good-for-you” appearance, a look that may deter potential readers.

Ignore the cover. This is not some dreary textbook, but an engaging, quirky read. Roze has a gift for physical imagery. A porcupine molting in spring has “fur blowing like a dandelion clock.” A second porky makes a winter den inside “a strange old sugar maple like a giant bird’s leg kicking skyward.”

Roze, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Queens College, writes with the warmth and confidence of a favorite college professor. He has a knack for balancing detailed scientific explanations with personal anecdotes, presenting what could be dry information with page-turning appeal. For example, his discussion of quill anatomy segues into a cheerful description of his own quilling by an irate porcupine, and the subsequent journey of one of these projectiles through the interior of Roze’s arm. Two days later, the quill emerged while Roze was teaching a lab class. This reemergence segues to another scientific discussion: why didn’t Roze suffer a massive infection? Because porcupine quills are coated with antibiotic grease. This grease protects porcupines who self-impale (they have an alarming tendency to fall out of trees), as well as unwary college professors.

The second edition of The North American Porcupine also describes several new discoveries made by Roze in the 10 years since initial publication. One of these discoveries: why porcupines ingest clay. The reason has to do with the digestive arms race between porcupines and the trees they forage, spring through fall.

“Trees do not wait for animals to eat them,” Roze notes, but instead defend themselves by changing their tissue chemistry over the year. Sugar maple buds, for example, make for good snacking in early spring, but the trees soon fight back by saturating leaf tissues with defensive, inedible tannins. Porcupines respond to such tactics by repeatedly shifting their diets, taking advantage of the most edible (vulnerable) periods of different tree species. Eating clay also helps porcupines, Roze hypothesizes, by neutralizing some plant toxins.

One of the most compelling revelations of this book is the author. Here is a man who has squeezed himself into rock dens, chased a porcupine up a tree to inspect (then cure) its scabies infection, and raised an orphaned porcupette from infancy, taking on the responsibility “not only for her feeding and accommodation, but her emotional and intellectual development, as well.” As one of the many organisms inhabiting the northern woods, Uldiz Roze himself is a “surprise and delight,” well worth observation.

Elise Tillinghast

© 2010 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates

There are some 90,000 species of insects in North America, far more than any other group of organisms (compare this to the approximately 700 bird species found in the same geographic area). Several field guides have been published that offer a reference for people wanting to learn to identify these six-legged critters, but no books that I’m aware of have focused so extensively on the signs of insect presence, which is virtually everywhere you look. In Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates, Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney offer a firstever look at many phenomena associated with insects, helping to identify the creators and explain what’s going on.

More of an information or reference guide than a field guide, this book examines the multitude of evidence that insects leave all around us. The book is laid out in paragraph format rather than the plates typically found in field guides. This allows the authors to go into detail beyond a simple captioned photograph. The book is stuffed with full-color images, many taken by the authors during a 15,000 mile, 40-day road trip they undertook for the purpose, but quite a few of the photos were collected from other amateur and professional entomologists.

The text is information-rich, easy to read, and logically organized. The various categories of insect sign fall into broad chapter headings such as “Eggs and Egg Cases,” “Leaf Mines,” “Galls,” and “Sign on Twigs, Stems and Stemlike Structures.” Eighteen chapters treat everything from dragonfly exuviae (the shed exoskeleton left behind after the moult from nymph to adult) to the scrapings left by a snail’s “teeth” as it forages, to the folded-over leaves many caterpillars and other insects use for shelter, to the various burrows some insects make in the sand. You’ve probably seen many of the signs in this book but didn’t realize that they were made by insects; after flipping through the guide, you’ll go back to have another look.

If there’s one tiny disappointment I have with the book, it’s that they don’t have a better treatment of the different bark beetle gallery patterns encountered on dead logs and trees, among the most easily-observed of insect sign during the winter months. Still, the complaint is a small one, and their coverage of other topics is excellent. Thirty-three pages are dedicated to the many different types of spider web, thirty-two cover a variety of leaf mines, twenty-seven discuss the galls found on leaves and twigs; there are even thirty-seven pages on the tracks insects leave in sand and mud as they travel. Common phenomena are well-represented, but other observations are also given admirable treatment, and I have been able to identify many findings simply from flipping through the book.

I highly recommend this guide to anyone who, like me, has a tendency to pause and puzzle over curious things they encounter while out hiking. Eiseman and Charney have done an outstanding job compiling what is undeniably an overwhelming amount of diverse information. This book will be taking a spot on my bookshelf as one of my primary go-to insect guides.

Seabrooke Leckie

© 2010 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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Natural Landscapes of Maine: A Guide to Natural Communities and Ecosystems

As a forest ecologist, one of the things I really enjoy about my work is being able to observe how trees and other plants grow in different combinations in different regions. For example, a northern hardwood forest in Maine is likely to be dominated by some combination of sugar maple, yellow birch, and beech. In northern Wisconsin, however, I would expect to find maple sharing the canopy with basswood and white ash, a combination found only on the richest sites in Maine. The factors that drive these regional patterns in forest types – namely climate and soils – also operate at more local scales within an ecological region or state.

For foresters, the ability to recognize these local and regional patterns is an important component of ecological forestry, and for those who simply enjoy time in the woods, this knowledge adds depth to the experience in the same way that some people may enjoy the subtle differences in varieties of wine or beer.

Foresters, landowners, and nature lovers in Maine now have a useful guide to identify the various natural communities found in the state. Natural Communities of Maine provides easy-to-understand descriptions of the natural community types recognized by the Maine Natural Areas program. Each community is described on a pair of facing pages; descriptions include a list of characteristic plants, tips on how to differentiate the community from similar types, soil and site characteristics, conservation, wildlife, management considerations, distribution of the community within Maine, and where examples can be found on public lands. Color photos and range maps round out the descriptions.

You don’t need to be an expert at plant identification to use this book. A dichotomous key in the beginning helps the reader quickly identify the most likely community from a range of possibilities. The forest communities can be sorted out by easy to identify plants, mostly canopy species. Because landscape position is frequently used as a diagnostic characteristic, most of the communities dominated by nonwoody plants can also be sorted out, even if, like me, you’re weak when it comes to identifying grasses and sedges. Also useful are background sections on natural communities and ecosystems and comparisons with other classification systems.

This book is a must buy (and must use) for foresters and other natural resource professionals in Maine. Some land managers may find that this is the only system they need to classify and map plant communities, while others may find that using the natural community classification in addition to whatever cover type system they are currently using will strengthen the ecological foundations of their management.

Natural Communities of Maine is also strongly recommended for others who want to know the what and why of Maine’s forest, wetland, and tidal ecosystems.

As of the time of this publication, this book is not available on Amazon. Please click here to order your copy.

Robert Bryan

© 2010 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.