2 Feb 2015
We have an old porcupine which we had from a baby and brought here from Rovieng. He has been penned up with the two remaining deer and we would see him (or her) daily when we feed them. Then we didn’t see him for a few days and a porcupine showed up in the camera trap one night, about a kilometre from the pen. Ben was thinking that just maybe our Porky had escaped since villagers have not seen any porcupines in the area for a while. We weren’t sure. Then one night Soon after, Ben was feeding the deer in the pen and who should be there but Porky and running off into the grass was another porcupine, rattling his pines as he trotted away. We had just read a story on CNN about a lone porcupine in the zoo in Israel. Every night, they found porcupine droppings outside the porcupine enclosure and they were baffled. When they put a camera trap up, they discovered that there was another porcupine who would come to visit the one in the cage—every night. How sweet. They couldn’t work out where he came from as they zoo is in the middle of town. But apparently, porcupines like friends, and ours now has a friend. We put our camera trap up and didn’t get a shot with the two porcupines together, but separate shots of two, we think, different individuals. Not totally sure, but they seem to have different “hairstyles.”
Postscript
We have been typing up while offline and waiting for our connection to improve. Hence these postscripts! Ben was in the garden last night. While there one of these guys goes scurrying off into the bushes, turning around and rattling his spines. He wasn’t acting very scared. Soon another goes rattling off. One of them must have been our captive one (escaped into the garden). However two minutes later while walking by the cage, there sits our Porky. Now, who is who? That makes three individuals. And the cage must be compromised. And worse, the garden fence also useless!
