Skunks come out during hot days, nights,
Hot days and warm summer nights tends to make more animal activity visible to Tehachapi residents, including one species that even if you don’t see, you can literally smell from a mile away: skunks.
These familiar black and white striped mammals are here yearround, of course, but they are more evident during the warmer months. Several evenings recently I have stepped outside into the darkness of a Tehachapi night, with a bright starlit sky above me, and noticed the faint but distinctive scent of a skunk borne on the westerly breeze.
Skunks are most active at night, but they can be seen during the day as well. May, June and July are the months when you are most likely to find a mother skunk patiently taking a family trip with her kits.
Striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis) can have lots of babies — there was one under a shed at the VFW Post on Tehachapi Boulevard that had nine babies, and I trapped and removed one small young mother and her eight kits from a friend’s house. I usually see skunk families with more like three or five babies.
Female skunks raise their babies without help from the males, and female skunks tend to be devoted and motherly to their kits. After a gestation period lasting about two months, the mother gives birth in a den, which may consist of the abandoned burrow of different mammal, but around human habitation it is often underneath a shed, outbuilding, house or other structure.
When the babies are around five or six weeks old, the mother begins taking them on outings, which is a demanding process for her, because they tend to wander and play even as she is trying to
keep them all together.
I have stopped my car to provide safety to skunk families crossing a road, and it resembles a preschool outing, with the mother skunk seeming to keep imploring everyone to “keep up, stay together.”
My friend Toshimi Kristof and her husband Les recently encountered a mother skunk and her three kits passing through their yard in Bear Valley Springs during the daytime, and Toshimi said that the three babies kept chasing their mother’s tail and attempting to hide underneath it.
Skunk mothers do use their large fluffy tail as a kind of umbrella to shelter their babies when they are small.
Skunks are mostly insectivores, eating grasshoppers, beetles, bees, grubs and larvae, etc., though they can also be omnivorous and eat things like mice, eggs, chicks, lizards. They aren’t very fast and can’t see especially well, so they don’t make very formidable predators. They will also eat plant material like berries, fruit, corn, etc.
The skunks themselves, especially the young ones, are vulnerable to predation, since they are easy to catch, but with their pungent and fetid scent
defense mechanism, most animals will wisely leave them alone. Great-horned Owls, however, will actively hunt skunks and are probably their main predator in the Tehachapi Mountains.
Owls, like most birds, have very little sense of smell, and their hunting method of swooping
down from above and delivering a lethal talon grip to the head means that they can often catch skunks without the skunk having the opportunity to spray.
Warm nights mean more animal activity after dark, so keep your eyes open for deer, bobcats, bears, foxes, and other local
wildlife at night. And look out for mother skunks with babies.
Have a good week.