Are porcupines known to enter homes or yards?
As herbivores, porcupines do not wander onto residential properties for the same reasons as most animal pests. The rodents eat a variety of herbaceous plants, tree barks, twigs, and leaves, and the most important nutritional element they derive from this diet, which is essential to porcupine health and survival, is nitrogen. To get enough nitrogen, porcupines are known to chew on things like the wooden handles of tools, manmade wooden structures, and accumulated roadside salt runoffs.
If they are getting enough sustenance in nature, porcupines remain innocuous. However, if food sources are limited, as they are during the spring and summer, porcupines will absolutely invade yards, though they rarely wander inside homes.