No, it’s not our politicians, sewage plants or your neighbor’s trash. If you have been on Route 287, Route 9 or Lovettsville Road lately, you can’t miss it. The unmistakable, not to be ignored, pungent odor of skunk, courtesy of the pickup truck that likely ran the poor sucker over.
There are dead skunks everywhere! Have you noticed? (How could you not?) I have, and so have some of my friends. My husband wondered if it was mating season. I scoffed, thinking to myself, “I have never seen this many dead skunks on the road in February. If it were mating season, wouldn’t we have noticed all the road kill last year, and the year before that too?”
Come to find out, my dearest darling was right again. (I hate when that happens!) According to WonderClub.com (don’t judge; it had good pictures), it is in fact mating season for the striped skunk, and will be until March.
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I thought I would gather some other pertinent data about our smelly striped friends for you, in the unfortunate event that you should meet one.
1- Skunk spray can cause temporary blindness. (So shut your eyes if you see one. Which could get dicey if you are also trying to make a fast getaway…)
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2- Skunks are meat eaters and hunt by scent. (Irony, at its best. A smelly smeller. Who’d have thunk?)
3- Skunks are sociable creatures (when not spraying their friends with blinding noxious spray, of course) that share dens with other species, like foxes. Interesting roomates!
4- The striped skunk (the ones you see littering Loudoun County roadsides) is common almost everywhere in America. But there’s good news. Miami and the most south west corner of Arizona seem to be relatively free of the little stinkers. So there is hope, albeit small.
5- Skunks can spray 8 to 15 feet. That is a very scary statistic for me, because I really don't run that fast.
6- The “Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management” advises that skunks “have great confidence in defending themselves against other animals.” I will let you decide what to do with that little nugget of information.
http://www.wonderclub.com/Wildlife/mammals/stripedskunk.html
