How do they taste?
It's all in the preparation.
The first one I ever shot I took home and roasted. That wasn't very good. In fact it made my wife vomit! (to be fair she was 7 months pregnant
) After talking to a few folks who are much better cooks than I am, I found out that porcupine is a perfect substitute for beaver. I made a heck of a porcupine chili last year.
The young ones taste the best, like you'd expect. The older ones are tough and have a very strong piney taste. This year's and the one from 2 years ago had worms, so I didn't eat them. I'm not taking any chances for one of these critters.
thats a hornaday for ya 
what do you do with them ?
The quills and guard hairs are worth some money, so I pull those and sell them. The claws are pretty cool too, so I have a few sets of those. Mostly though, I treat these critters like people treat ground hogs. They're just varmints. They do a lot of damage to the trees so I wouldn't feel too bad about shooting them and then leaving them for the coyotes. Since they're so tough, they make a great test for bullets. With the thick fur, hide, and quills, porcupines are surprisingly tough to kill. I've watched them take several solid hits to the brain with a 22lr and just keep kicking. Even after taking a 10mm to the throat and through the chest, this one didn't go down as fast as you'd think.
How do you hunt porcupines?
I see them occasionally while out hunting but I don't know how I'd go about finding one on purpose.
It seems like every time I step into the woods down in Ryderwood, I spot one. They're usually in or around brush piles at the edge of the timber. Check the landing at the end of logging roads. Lots of times there are brush piles with blackberries or other bramble growing on them. The porcupines seem to love eating those fresh blackberry leaves. You can also look for an area where there's a patch of dead fir trees in the middle of a stand of otherwise healthy timber. The porcupines will ring the trees and kill them. I can usually find a critter or two near by.
In the name of responsible conservation, I limit my self to 2 porcupines per year. They reproduce pretty slowly and my goal has never been to eradicate them. They are fun to watch in the woods. They just ramble along doing their own thing, not really scared of anything. Unless I haven't filled my quota for the year.........
Andrew
