Making a Big Stink
The mild-mannered skunk—always eager to keep the peace—is badly in need of some good PR.
EARLIER THIS SUMMER, I invited Kathy Dean, a Massachusetts naturalist and an expert wildlife tracker, to tour our scrap of a yard in Northampton. Kathy is like a PI who finds all her clues in nature.
“Who’s digging all those holes in my herb garden?” I asked her.
A dozen holes, small and conical shaped, had appeared over the last couple of weeks in random spots, dotted among the basil plants and big mats of thyme. They looked too shallow for burrowing, more a dent than a hole. “Looks like a skunk,” she said, bending over to measure the depth with her fingertips. “They’ve been digging for grubs.”
She then turned, pointing to a freshly dug dirt pile in front of the latticework beneath our front porch: “And I think they might be living under there.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was not, after all, our first go-round with a skunk.
ON A SUMMER NIGHT ten years ago, I let our two dogs out the back door into our small fenced yard, as I always do at bedtime. This night they flew off the porch in a single bound. Our golden retriever got to the skunk first, grabbing it in his mouth, then standing there with a wild-eyed look that can only be described as abject disappointment.
“Drop it, Gus!” I screamed and he did, only to have our tiny dog Holly (RIP) scramble for it next. Now the entire neighborhood could hear me. Holly dropped it too and bolted for the house. Gus followed. The terrified skunk scurried into the night.
I let both dogs in. They were frantic, rubbing their faces on the rugs. They squirmed so much I couldn’t catch them. I yelled to my husband James, “Google ‘What to do when your dog gets skunked’!”
Gus and Holly moved on to scraping their jowls along the upholstered furniture.
“So, what does it say?” I pleaded.
“Number one,” he said, reading off the computer, “don’t let them in the house.”
WITH A SKUNK probably asleep under our porch, I knew I was overdue to learn more about them.
Despite the panic that skunks provoke in us, they are retiring animals, low key and slow to provoke. More Flower from Bambi than Pepe Le Pew.
Jerry Dragoo is a New Mexico mephitologist—a biologist specializing in skunks—and the founder of the Dragoo Institute for the Betterment of Skunks and Skunk Reputations. “A lot of people say, ‘I’ve got a skunk in my backyard: What do I do?’ says Dragoo. “And my advice is to get a lawn chair, pour a beer, put your feet up, and watch it, because it’s very entertaining.”
I have yet to meet our reclusive housemate—skunks are primarily crepuscular—but I know it’s a striped skunk (mephitis mephitis). There are 12 skunk species in all. Ten of them range from Canada to Costa Rica, and five of them live in the U.S. Striped skunks are New England’s only skunk resident, the skunk of cartoon fame. They range from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Clearly, we humans have been holding our noses for as long as we’ve existed. Biologists have used the molecular clock—a DNA timeline that determines when a lineage diverges into two—to estimate that the skunk family originated about 32 million years ago. Until the 1990s, scientists believed skunks were related to weasels. DNA research has since reclassified them in a family of their own, Mephitidae, which includes stink badgers from the Philippines and Indonesia. (But don’t confuse skunks with polecats, which are from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Polecats appear to be brown skunks, but they are in fact related to weasels. No wonder colonists often referred to American skunks as “polecats.” In fact, some Southern dialects still do.)
Mephitis is the Latin word for “malodorous.” It’s also the name of a Roman goddess with the unenviable distinction of being the goddess of foul-smelling gases from volcanoes and swamps. The common word skunk has a local connection. It’s derived from squuncke, a word from the Massachusett language. In turn, squuncke came from a Proto-Algonquian word meaning “urinate” + “foxlike animal” that dates back 3,000 years.
Martin Dobrizhoffer, an 18th century Jesuit missionary, wrote of American skunks, "Had I a hundred tongues I should think them all insufficient to convey an adequate idea of the stench."
"Europe,” he added, imperiously, “may be congratulated upon her good fortune in being unacquainted with this cursed beast."
A BRIEF INTERNET SEARCH of “skunks” pulls up hundreds of pest control sites warning about the dangers of skunks. They stink. They ruin your lawn. They carry rabies. So let’s dig a little deeper (unlike those skunks) before we call in the exterminator.
#1 Skunks stink. True or false?
True, but rarely.
Striped skunks are hopelessly near-sighted, slow, and bad at climbing, so when all hell breaks loose—like with Gus and Holly—a stink bomb is the only defense they’ve got. (If you click on no other link in this essay, click on this one to see how unthreatening skunks can be. And keep your volume up!)
Skunks will do everything they can to avoid launching a strike. A striped skunk, for instance, stores only about two ounces of spray, so once its glands are empty, it’s defenseless until it can manufacture more—and that can take days. It will be histrionic in its attempts to dissuade attackers. It stomps its feet and poofs out its tail. It makes theatrical advances. It flashes its caboose and hisses.
All carnivores have anal sac glands, but skunks are armed with advanced papillae: guided missiles that deliver a sulphureous compound that contains thiols and thioacetates. To add to the assault, the yellow liquid is oily and utterly vexing to remove from clothes, skin, and dog fur. (Tomato juice doesn’t work, but this mixture does.) If a threatened skunk has the time and wherewithal, it will bend into a U-shape—to give it a clear line of sight—and fire a stream as far as 10 feet, straight into its attacker’s eyes. If it has only seconds or can’t properly see the threat, it will emit an atomized cloud instead. Either way, the chemicals momentarily sting the eyes, giving the skunk enough time to make its getaway.
So, if skunks are reluctant to spray, why does it seem that every few weeks, around my house anyway, someone pauses, sniffs the air, and says, “Do you smell skunk?”
Given their powerful defense mechanism and general lack of predators, skunks tend to be unguarded—it’s that lackadaisical nature—and slow to move away from busy roadsides. Besides, everything they see in the distance just looks like a big blob. Their number one enemy is, by far, cars. And the smell of skunk roadkill carries a mile and a half.
(After cars, their enemies are dogs, great horned owls, who have a poor sense of smell, and coyotes and foxes, who have an incredible sense of smell so only hunt skunks when they’re wildly hungry. Then of course there are the exterminators.)
#2 Skunks ruin our lawns. True or false?
It depends on what you mean by “ruin.”
A lot of homeowners hate grubs—which are beetle larvae—because they feed on the roots of turf grass, leaving large thatches of brown lawn. (Interestingly, grubs are most attracted to well-watered, fertilized lawns, so the more homeowners invest in pristine lawns, the more likely they’ll get grubs.) A lot of homeowners also hate skunks because they use their long front claws to dig for grubs, creating pockmarks like I saw in my herb garden.
So the commercial one-two-punch goes like this: Call in an exterminator to kill the skunks who are killing the grubs, then call in a chemical lawn company to kill the grubs. All at a cost of hundreds of dollars.
Skunks are opportunistic eaters. In addition to grubs, they eat small rodents, like mice and baby rats, eggs of all kinds, earthworms, honeybees and honey, fruits and vegetables, and all variations on human food, like garbage and compost. They like protein. “If a skunk has a choice between a tomato and a tomato worm, it’ll go after the tomato worm,” says Dragoo.
The earliest legislation protecting skunks passed in New York in 1893 at the request of hop growers, who were overrun by hop plant-borers. A Farmer's Bulletin from the USDA in 1914 reads, “Skunks are among the most useful of the native mammals and are most efficient helps to the farmer and orchardist in their warfare against insect and rodent pests.”
#3 Skunks carry rabies. True or false?
True, some do. Bats, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and woodchucks also do. Bats are the most widely feared rabies-carrier though less than one half of 1% of all bats in North America are infected. (Smaller mammals are even less likely to carry rabies. Birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and insects never get it.) As mythical and scary a disease as it is, rabies is exceedingly rare in humans. Since 1935, there has only been one case of a human contracting it in Massachusetts—a Cape Cod resident who was bitten by a brown bat in 2011.
Striped skunks contract the “raccoon strain” of rabies, typically when they are bitten or scratched by another skunk. If you believe you have seen a skunk, or any mammal, with rabies, call a state wildlife expert. An animal who is behaving very aggressively, seizing, or having trouble with its balance may be rabid, or it may be infected with another disease, like distemper.
So what did we decide to do about the skunk under the porch?
Nothing. We don’t mind imperfections in our lawn and garden, as any of our neighbors can attest. And we always vaccinate our dogs who are much more likely than we are to get bitten. (If your experience is different and you have a problem resident skunk, please consider these possibilities before calling an exterminator.)
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STRIPED SKUNKS ARE mostly loners, heading out in the evenings for hours of foraging, revisiting the same mile-long route. (I too often walk the same loop through my neighborhood at the end of the day. This year I have seen the same skunk at the same time of night in the same front yard just a couple of streets away.) When at rest, skunks either take up residence in dens abandoned by other mammals or dig their own. Burrows can be 20 feet long. In winter, skunks will sometimes huddle with their brethren for warmth.
Skunks don’t hibernate. They go into a state of torpor, relying on their fat storage and losing as much as 65% of their body mass by spring. Snow is tough for them to navigate with their stubby little legs so they try to go out only on warm winter days. Many don’t survive the season.
Female striped skunks typically breed once a year sometime between February and April. After mating, the doe wants nothing to do with the buck, and will fight to keep him away. (I watched a documentary that recorded two of them mating, and it’s no wonder.) Gestation lasts two months, and the litter usually numbers five to eight kits. Before they even grow fur, the kits’ skin bears the markings that will make each of them unique. The most common pattern is a white “V” down their backs with a white bar running down their foreheads. In nature, bright, contrasting colors are the international sign for danger (like our skull and crossbones). It’s called aposematism.
Between feedings, a mother skunk leaves her newborn litter in the den so she can look for food. Once the kits are weaned, at six to eight weeks, they start venturing out with her to learn to forage. Male kits strike out on their own in late summer—so right about now—while the females tend to stick around until the spring, even sharing a winter burrow with their mother and sisters.
So, will predators go after skunks, time after miserable time?
It depends. Biologists in Utah recently conducted an experiment with a population of 49 captive coyotes using simulated skunks that emitted (mild) skunk spray. Four coyotes wouldn’t go anywhere near the “skunks.” The theory is that those four saw the black and white fur as an ominous sign of what awaited. Most of their peers, however, got sprayed—and many more than once. In the end, it took the coyotes an average of 2.4 times to learn to steer clear. (The biologists speculated that if the spray had been undiluted, most of the coyotes wouldn’t have tried a second time.)
Gus is an old guy now, not as quick to dash off the porch. I don’t know if he wised up or never got the opportunity again, but he has gone un-skunked since that fateful night. He has two younger and boisterous brothers now who I suspect would relish the opportunity to chase a skunk. Each night before I let the three of them out the back door at bedtime, I blink the lights, bang the screen door a few times, and call out, “They’re heeeeere!”
So far, it’s working.
SKUNK MARGINALIA
“Skunk Hour” is one of Robert Lowell’s most beloved poems—and a testament to the skunk’s adaptation to life among humans. Its final stanza concludes:
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
The Skunk, written by the brilliant Mac Barnett and illustrated by Patrick McDonnell, was named A New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book of 2015. It’s the tale of a city man who is being followed by a skunk.
Skunk on a String, by the collage artist Thao Lam, is a charming wordless picture book about a hapless skunk who sails across the city, hanging from a balloon.
Some states allow residents to keep skunks as pets. Most of those skunks have had their scent glands surgically removed. Pet skunks are illegal in Massachusetts.
About one in every 1,000 people are unable to smell thiols, the chemicals that give skunk spray its odor. It’s a specific form of anosmia, or blindness to scent. Jerry Dragoo, the mephitologist, is one of those people.
I always love your marginalia as much as I love your post and this one was the best!
Aw. Makes me so happy to see your name pop up, Emily! Enjoy those West Coast skunks!