Stowaway porcupine travels nearly 1,000 kilometres across B.C.

You’re heard of snakes on a plane, but how about a porcupine?

A young porcupine that crawled into the wreckage of a small plane recovered in northern B.C. was discovered days later and nearly a thousand kilometres away – and work is underway to get the animal back home.

The Interior Wildlife Rehabilitation Society was contacted by the company that transported the plane from the crash site near Mackenzie to a salvage yard in Kelowna after the stowaway was found hiding under one of the plane’s two seats and attempts to lure it out with food were unsuccessful.

“I was very surprised by that request. This definitely has not happened before,” said Eva Hartmann, the society’s founder and executive director.

The volunteer-run organization takes in roughly 100 animals a year, always with the goal of re-releasing them to within 10 kilometres of where they came from. Usually wildlife is dropped-off for the society at their partner-veterinary clinics because the Interior Wildlife has limited resources and does not pick up their patients themselves.

But in this case, Hartmann made an exception and gathered a crew to help extract the porcupine with the help of a veterinarian who could sedate the rodent. The long journey would have left the animal hungry, parched and disoriented, Hartmann said.

“It hadn’t had any food or water and it’s also really hot right now in the Okanagan. It was obviously scared, and it didn’t make any moves of trying to come out by itself. It was probably exposed to a lot of noise and moving around,” she told CTV News, explaining why she decided to intervene.

“It was likely to just crawl into another plane part or any kind of machine at that industrial yard, and we certainly wanted to avoid that. A small porcupine has lots of places it can hide in. And certainly that wouldn’t have been good if it then would have got lost again somewhere else,” she continued.

The rescue was a delicate operation due to the tight space and the porcupine’s prickly exterior but it went off without any quills being lost.

“We didn’t want it to lose a lot of quills,” Hartmann said. “That would be bad for the animal, because then it doesn’t have its proper defense mechanism anymore. And also, I don’t like to have quills in my fingers.”

Some animals – marmots, in particular, are known to end up far from home after inadvertently hitching a ride on the underside of a vehicle, according to Hartmann.

Porcupines, however, “are not a common species to hitch rides,” she said. They are drawn to salt which Hartmann thinks explains why this one ended up in the plane’s seat.

“The seats and seat belts are most likely to have been sweaty, so there (were) traces of salt … and they were all chewed up,” Hartmann said.

Porcupine patients are not uncommon at the rehabilitation centre but returning them to where they belong is not usually as complicated as it is in this case.

The effort to get the porcupine back to where the plane went down involves getting the exact location of the crash site, working with local and provincial governments to get authorization and finding pit stops at other animal welfare organizations to help the animal along the way.

“We would like to release her as soon as possible,” Hartmann said.

“The goal of everything that we do is to release the animals again. Same with this one.”