View topic - Axe handles paddles and porcupines

Many of the old timer books I read as a child warned about porcupines coming in to camp at night and chewing the salt out of the wooden handles.They advised to always secure them safely.Is that an old wives tale? I never even had a single porcupine enter camp.Also I’ve never met anyone who mentioned it happening to them.

Not an old wives tale.
Not sure about an ax but they did chew my brake lines when they had a high salt content in the rubber.
Jeff

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Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss. — (David Bolling, Ho

I've heard this same from various sources. I'm sure there is truth to it somewhere along the way, in a time and place where porcupines were common. None of them types of critters near me, just trash pandas now but when I lived i Alberta there fairly common.

Porcupines like glue too( it has salt in it).. On the Appalachian Trail on a section in Maine I helped maintain, porkies chewed the bottom half of the plywood sided outhouse.

We rebuilt a new outhouse and swathed it in chicken wire That would make a heck of a paddle bag though

https://cottagelife.com/outdoors/porcup ... g-plywood/

I have friends who used to pack horses into the mountains in the 60's and 70's. One evening they rode into camp and there was a porcupine up in a tree. The man wanted to shoot it with his pistol, just because, but the wife and kids protested and managed to persuade him to leave the poor porcupine alone.

During the night the porcupine came down and ate their reins.

Alan

I have never witnessed this personally but have heard stories about it. Perhaps they are not in abundance as they once were or not as noticeable as other varmint are. I have never taken precautions for Porcupines before, but i guess I will give it some thought when I tote my $300 axe into the backcountry

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Outbound2Explore

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit. ~ Edward Abbey

Complaints about porcupine damage to tools, vehicles, structures, and maple trees were common in Vermont when I was growing up in the 1970s. Since then the population of the fisher (aka 'fisher cat', I think it is the pekan in Canadian French) has rebounded, and porcupines and porcupine damage are much scarcer. Fishers are one of the few effective predators of porcupines, and had been nearly eliminated during the 19th century by fur trapping and habitat loss. - K

In Ontario, BC, the Yukon, and Alberta, I've personally seen the results of porcupines chewing axe handles, rifle stocks, paddles, snowshoes, and in one unfortunate incident in the Ogilvie Range in Yukon, we had to medevac a sorry soul who neglected to look into the hole in a 3 hole outhouse, before he was heavily quilled in the groin area, by one that was inside the frame chewing on the rim of the hole.

It's no wives tale that they will come into camp and chew on things that they find salty.
When tripping, my axe and shotgun are in my tent at night, and my paddles rest outside the tent but under the fly, and whenever I use a Woody (outhouse), I always check inside the frame for those prickly rodents.

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Ubique

Chicken wire only worked on a temporary basis, Have to move to sheet metal for the inside of the outhouse, and regular lumber over the plywood, also a plastic seat.

it's now been a couple of years since he/she was able to have a meal of that salty, gluey goodness but he/she still comes by on a regular basis to leave "gifts".

I have left axes and other wooden handled tools out at ground level (normally stored on hangers on the cabin wall) and never had any issues.

They do like salt but the ones that come around my cabin are more interested in plywood glue.

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"What else could I do? I had no trade so I became a peddler" - Lazarus Greenberg 1915

Porkies ate the handles, one rubber and one cork, clean off two of my fishing rods left leaning against a tree ten feet from the tent one night. CLEAN off, down to the bare shaft on both. No doubt those handles had a lot of salt sweat.

They ate the deck bungee off a friend’s sea kayak on a Maine lake. Yum, sea salt.

Great story but I take it with a grain or 2 of salt!!

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Old canoeists never die---they just smell that way.

I lost most of a bicycle seat due to porky's chewing when I left it to go backpacking After a 15 mile ride in from my car. I stashed it in the woods off the trail where I thought it would be 'safely" hidden from view, but did not think about the seat being salty. I had an uncomfortable ride out carrying a heavy backpack. Guess I was lucky it did not go for my tires. When canoe camping I always carefully stash my wood paddles at night where they are not easy for a critter to get.

Wotrok, in the several years that I've been a member on this site, your comments are the first time that I've seen anyone call anyone else a liar. Maybe your laughing face emoji behind your comments makes them OK in your mind, but not in mine.

It was on Gil Creek in the Ogilvie Range in 1976, I was working with Hudson's Bay Explorations based out of Whitehorse, and they used to hire geology students from UBC as temps, and it was one of those temps that had his crotch savaged by porcupine quills because he did not bother to look inside the outhouse frame before he sat down. We injected him with a morphine syrette (yes, they were available to bush workers back then), strapped him face down into a diamond drill core sample pod on a Hughes 500C chopper, and flew him to the hospital in Clinton 'Creek, 75miles away. He never returned to us.

Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant to me. But I do confess to being disappointed in you posting your dismissive and rude comments on this otherwise respectful site. Maybe it's a result of too much salt in your diet?

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Ubique

It is so hard to convey the sense of humor intended on a message board post.

I think wotrock wuz jest joshin' around.

Never mind, it's time to get really serious here... I've read somewhere that porcupines like to sit on a pile of doodoo of their own making, maybe the human kind makes an acceptable substitute.

Pandora's box...snakes, spiders and now porcupines comfortably snoozing on a pile of crap. What horrors await within... do not disturb, maybe a thousand bloodthirsty bats will come flying out.

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