Get Up Close and Personal
With Some of Nature's Best Teachers
Meet our Mammals:
A Porcupine & a Bat
Big Brown Bat
Pollux is a big brown bat, one of the most common bats in Minnesota. He is unable to fly due to a wing injury from unknown causes. He was given to us by the Minnesota Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Big brown bats are cavity dwellers and they are extremely important animals because they eat insects, like mosquitos, which we have many of here in northern Minnesota.
North American Porcupine
Thistle was found in May of 2007 when he was about a month old. He found in the woods near his mother, who had died. Just a baby a little bigger than a grapefruit, he was brought to a wildlife rehabilitator who cared for him until a permanent home at Wolf Ridge was arranged.
Porcupines are very dependent upon their mothers for the first 6 months of their life and socialize easily. Since his associations at an early age were with people, he will not be able to be released back into the wild. Thistle helps us educate people about wild porcupines and other northern Minnesota wildlife.
- Name: Thistle
- Species: North American Porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum
- Injury: None, Orphaned
The second largest rodents in North America (behind the beaver), porcupines spend most of their time up in trees foraging for leaves, buds and catkins in the summer and bark in the winter. They have about 30,000 quills that they are born with and they cannot shoot them like many people believe. You must come into contact with the porcupine to get stuck with the quills. Their range includes western to northern United States and up into Canada, and it is growing larger every year.
- Diet: herbivore preferring sugar maple buds, berries, foliage, and tree cambium in the winter
- Habitat: coniferous, deciduous, mixed forest
- Behavior: solitary, nocturnal, excellent climbers (often found in trees foraging and sleeping),
- Vocalizations: make a variety of grunts and noises
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