Porcupines are easy to recognize but hard to find — so elusive, in fact, that few people have ever seen one in the wild. Emilio Tripp, a wildlife manager and citizen of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, might have been one of the lucky ones. On a nighttime drive with his father in the late 1990s, a ghostly silhouette flashed by the window. “That was my only time I’ve even thought I’ve seen one,” he recalled decades later. Tripp still can’t say for sure whether it was a kaschiip, the Karuk word for porcupine, but he holds on to the memory like a talisman as more and more porcupines disappear from their native habitats.

The 43-year-old hasn’t seen another porcupine since. As porcupines increasingly disappear, porcupine encounters are rare among his tribe, and the few witnesses seem to fit a pattern: Almost all of them are elders, and they fondly remember an abundance of porcupines until the turn of this century. Now, each new sighting rings like an echo from the past: a carcass on the road; a midnight run-in. The tribe can’t help wondering: Where did all the porcupines go?

“Everyone’s concerned,” Tripp said. “If there were more (observations), we’d hear about it.”

The decline isn’t just in Northern California: Across the West, porcupines are vanishing. Wildlife scientists are racing to find where porcupines are still living, and why they’re disappearing. Others, including the Karuk Tribe, are already thinking ahead, charting ambitious plans to restore porcupines to their forests.

Porcupines are walking pincushions. Their permanently unkempt hairdo is actually a protective fortress of some 30,000 quills. But their body armor can be a liability, too — porcupines are known to accidentally quill themselves. “They’re big and dopey and slow,” said Tim Bean, an ecologist at California Polytechnic State University who has collared porcupines as part of his research. They waddle from tree to tree, usually at night, to snack on foliage or the nutrient-rich inner layer of bark.

But these large rodents are far from universally beloved, likely contributing to why porcupines are disappearing. Their tree-gnawing habits damage lumber, and the timber industry has long regarded them as pests. Widespread poisoning and hunting campaigns took place throughout the 1900s in the U.S. Between 1957 and 1959, Vermont alone massacred over 10,800 porcupines. Forest Service officials in California declared open season on porcupines in 1950, claiming that the species would ultimately destroy pine forests.

Read the full article about porcupine conservation by Shi En Kim at Sequencer.