Porcupines! (Shallow Thoughts)

Porcupines!

We had business in Albuquerque yesterday, and the weather was nice, so we brought our bikes along to explore the trails along the Rio Grande bosque.

It was a beautiful, relaxing ride. The trails were packed with happy, friendly cyclists, hikers, runners, plus people on scooters and a couple of those one-wheel, self balancing skateboards (which I'd never seen on a trail before). I think we saw more other trail users than in the cumulative past year hiking in our usual spots.

There were lots of cranes on the river and in the sky, and a roadrunner who ran across the trail in front of us, then slowly made its way up the branches of a tree before gliding across the canal then running up to the top. Dave and I never get tired of watching roadrunners — the most Velociraptor-like birds there are. I wish they were more common in White Rock.

But the highlight was porcupines. I'd never seen a porcupine before, and didn't even know they were around here, so it had never occurred to me to look. A woman we met at a spot by the river, watching cranes and killdeer, mentioned that she'd seen a tree with three porcupines in it, plus one on the ground, unfortunately dead. Apparently they're rather clumsy, and sometimes they lose their hold in a tree and fall to the ground.

The other three, still in the tree, were still alive as far as we could tell, though only one was moving, lazily swinging one arm. (Porcupines are nocturnal, so it's not surprising they weren't moving much as we watched them in the middle of the day.)

I'm grateful to the woman who told us about them! If I'd even noticed the large masses in the tree, I would have assumed they were nests of crows or hawks or some other large bird. "Porcupine" wouldn't have occurred to me. She said she'd actually seen a total of eight porcupines on her hike so far that day, so I guess they're surprisingly common in the bosque. I wonder if we have them here in White Rock. You can bet I'll be scanning the trees now as I hike, though our trees are mostly evergreens so it's a bit harder to see what might be hiding in them.

You just never know what you're going to see when you go out on the trail.