Wintery Porcupine

Here’s anoth­er short video clip of this por­cu­pine I came across while out pho­tograph­ing along the North Saskatchewan Riv­er in the Strath­cona Sci­ence Park. He (or she) was pret­ty small, maybe about the size of a beach ball, and was not going anywhere–if I moved too sud­den­ly he’d pause from his eat­ing, but he nev­er left his spot. It’s hard to imag­ine how a por­cu­pine can get enough nutri­tion out of the dried grass and seeds that he’s eat­ing here to be able to sur­vive the kind of cold that we’ve been get­ting late­ly, but I guess they do.

You can push the fullscreen but­ton (four out­ward arrows at the bot­tom-right of the video) to view it larg­er, or fol­low the link to watch a high-def­i­n­i­tion ver­sion at vimeo.com.