Bicolor-spined porcupine, Coendou bicolor

As some of you know, I visited Peru for a few months in early 2022, where I spent about two months volunteering at Ulcumano Ecolodge, an ecolodge at around 2000-2400m altitude on the Eastern slope. At the lodge I had multiple tasks, but to my pleasure one of the main ones was doing "bird inventarisations", where I'd wake up at consistent times in the morning and, weather permitting, note down every single bird I saw for a speficic amount of time. An added benefit was that this really filled out the eBird barcharts for january-march, which is normally the wet season (and also the low season, as many larger tour companies don't plan trips in the wet season), despite it also being the breeding season for many birds.

I bumped into this porcupine completely by chance. I had woken up early to do a bird inventarisation walk, but woke up to some of the heaviest rain I had experienced while there so far. Normally I would have stayed asleep for a bit longer or started making breakfast, but I had promised to bring something to the lodge owner's cabin early in the morning, so I stuffed my birding gear in a waterproof backpack and put on my jacket and went outside anyways. When I arrive at the cabin, I suddenly hear a weird but loud hiss coming from below, so I look down to see if it might be the dog, but underneath the cabin I see this incredible animal instead! This was my first wild porcupine of any sort, and absolutely dwarfed all Brazilian and North American porcupines I had ever seen in zoos.

"The bird of the trip was a mammal" is a funny one-liner that is regularly thrown around by birders after international trips. I think it would be dismissive to the cool birdlife I saw during my stay at Ulcumano (and Peru in general) to say the same thing here, but this mammal was perhaps definitely the most unexpected sighting!

This should be the nominate subspecies, bicolor.