Watch the Sighting:
Jaco De Swart was on a game drive in the heart of Kruger National Park when his group stumbled upon a prickly situation. The Satara area, known for its incredible predator sightings delivered a scene straight out of a wildlife documentary — a young, overconfident leopard was trying its luck with a porcupine in the middle of the road!
A Spiky Standoff
When Jaco and his group arrived on the scene, the excitement was palpable. It was evident that the leopard had already been trying its luck with the porcupine.
Its paws were visibly bloody, and it was licking them over and over, trying to pull quills out. Despite its injuries, the leopard’s determination didn’t waver.
It decided to try its luck a second time, clearly not having learned its lesson the first time around. Instead of trying to flee, the porcupine calmly held its ground and flared its quills, relying solely on its remarkable natural armour.
A Sharp Lesson
The young leopard tried repeatedly to get at the porcupine, but could not manage to get its paw past the quills. The two rivals spent the next few minutes slowly following each other around in a sort of dance, where the leopard would paw at the porcupine and the porcupine would rattle its quills.
Finally, after one too many quills through the paw, the leopard seemed to give up, frustrated it had wasted so much energy for no reward. That day, both the leopard and the safari-goers at the sight learned a valuable lesson: nature is full of surprises and persistence doesn’t always mean success.
In the wild, every animal has its limits. Even the fiercest predators have to learn the hard way that just because an animal is small, it is not necessarily easy to catch!
Nature’s Armour in Action
With their slow pace and small body size, porcupines appear unassuming to many predators in the wild. When threatened, however, they use specialized muscles called arrector pili to puff out over 30,000 quills which not only put a solid shield between themselves and their predators but also make them appear much bigger than they are.
It is a common misconception that porcupines can “throw” their quills. In reality, they are attached so loosely to their backs and tails, that when an individual rattles their quills to threaten predators, sometimes the quills will fall off in the process.
The quills, which are essentially specialized hollow hair cells, have a couple dark secrets that makes them far more dangerous than they look. Each quill is lined with tiny barbs that allow them to not only embed themselves into skin but also catch like a fish hook.
In addition, they are designed to both pierce a victim’s skin and also migrate forward from the original wound, making them even harder to remove. With a single curious prod from a paw, hundreds of quills can be released, making porcupines quite a deadly meal, especially considering the risk of infection from any quills that are improperly removed.
Hopefully, the young leopard learnt its lesson and will steer clear of porcupines in the future to avoid having its confidence punctured (quite literally) again.