'I was in shock': Sask. homeowner finds a porcupine stowaway in her garage

In a growing city it’s no surprise when suburban residents come across wild animals around their yards, but one Saskatoon homeowner in Kensington started poking around for answers when she spotted a quilled critter hanging out in her garage.

“So, I checked my cameras, and he came from behind my car and in this way.”

Security video captured the moment a porcupine decided to take up temporary shelter in Jackie Morley’s garage.

She hadn’t looked at her security footage before this happened.

“I’m in the garage and I’m putting things away. I turn around and there is a porcupine. I’m like is that real,” Morley told CTV News.

The animal wasn’t being aggressive but was more timid she recalls.

“I put something down and I was in shock. It had come halfway into the garage,” she says.

She relied on Google, which gave her the idea to leave out some water and apples which the porcupine ate more than half of. Morley credits watching animal shows on TV for helping her handle the situation.

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“Stay calm, talk in a good voice. Like, ok I’ll do those things. And it worked, nobody got hurt,” she said.

Morley called the City of Saskatoon, and they made it clear they do not provide wildlife removal services. They do have some information on their website about porcupines, which would help in this situation.

Ultimately, she got some advice from Living Sky Wildlife Rehabilitation staff, who said they would try to see if someone could come help her coax the porcupine out.

“The way that a porcupine protects itself is that it swings around and smacks you with its quills and tail. They can’t actually throw their quills,” Living Sky executive director Jan Shadick told CTV News.

The Living Sky staff Morley talked to suggested she should encourage the animal to vacate by leaving a door open. They said it would leave on its own at night, because they are nocturnal.

Shadick isn’t ruling out the possibility that this was a pregnant female looking for a spot to have her babies, but she can’t be 100 percent sure.

“Oh, ya, she’s pretty fat. She could be pregnant,” she said.

As for Morley, she says it was lucky her two small dogs weren’t in the garage, because it could’ve ended very differently.

After about eight hours in the garage, as suspected, the porcupine started making her way west.

“Two cars drove by and the porcupine was like, ‘No!’ You could see it was scared and came back up to the house,” Morley said.

After that, the porcupine hid behind the garbage cans in front of the garage until about 3 a.m., when she escaped into the night.