Note: This is a slight revisioning of a Facebook post that I made back on Sunday, Aug 31, 2014, four years ago. This was several years before I had this blog, so as some of my favorite posts cycle back through my daily “Memories” feature I figured that I would transfer them over to here since the photos and information don’t necessarily have an expiration date and are of wider interest to the general public.
Tonight I heard the live trap that I had set earlier in the off chance that I would catch some random plant predator fall shut with a metallic clank, and then the rhythmic noise of an animal running back and forth inside of it trying to get out. “Pack rat”, I thought, because 97% of what I catch at night are those. I was surprised to find that it was not a pack rat, but instead a western spotted skunk (Spilogale gracilis). These are not rare animals, but I do not see very many of them and it’s been at least 6 to 7 years since I last came across one here on my property. Arizona has four different skunk species, and this one is the smallest at 1.5 to 2 lbs (.6 to .9 kg) and the most likely to live in dry, rocky canyons and on desert hillsides and slopes like the ones on my property. The larger and more widespread striped skunk is much more tied to water sources in the deserts than spotted skunks are. The other two species, hooded skunks and hognose skunks, are mainly Mexican species that do inhabit the border regions of southern AZ but probably are not found in my corner of the state.
(Note from 2018: One of my FB friends who lives in Kingman, AZ said she came across a road-killed hog-nosed skunk on Hualapai Mountain Road, which leads to the similarly named Hualapai Mountain Park. The park, which contains the highest peak in Mohave County AZ and is covered in dense stands of Arizona Interior Chaparral vegetation and pinon-juniper/ponderosa pine/Douglas fir forest, has semi-permanent water sources in the canyon, which evidently are enough to support the hog-nosed skunk. I would love to see one someday!)
Because I am a curious sort and I took a lot of chemistry in college as a biology major, I decided to look into the molecular nature of skunk spray online. The most offensive chemicals that make everyone recoil (unless you are a great horned owl, with virtually no sense of smell – then you eat skunks for midnight snacks) are a class of compounds containing sulfur called thiols. The spray of different skunk species varies in terms of chemical composition. From a website at Humboldt State University in California I quote: “The defensive secretion of the spotted skunk differs from that of the striped skunk in that it only contains thiols and the thioacetates are not present. The two major thiols of the striped skunk, (E )-2-butene-1-thiol and 3-methyl-1-butanethiol are also the major components in the secretion of the spotted skunk. A third thiol, 2-phenylethanethiol, was present at moderate concentration in this smaller skunk.” There are also additional compounds with fancy names like phenylmethanethiol, 2-methylquinoline, 2-quinolinemethanethiol and bis[(E )-2-butenyl] disulfide that all combine into a potent brew that we call “skunk spray”, a brew strong enough to stop a bear in its tracks. Very little will eat a skunk outside of the aforementioned great horned owls, so skunks act extraordinarily confident for something weighing only a few pounds. Who wouldn’t be with an arsenal like that?
I found myself both pleased to encounter this beautiful mammal and apprehensive of its capacity to make my life miserable should it decide to fire off its chemical weaponry. I didn’t want to trigger its defenses, although in confined spaces like the cage skunks are quite hesitant to spray since they apparently dislike their own stench. So I took my 8 foot-long fiberglass-handled pole pruner and lifted the cage with the tip of the saw blade on the end into an open spot with great care, keeping myself a relatively safe distance away. I used the saw tip to flip up the locking bars so that the end doors of the cage could be lifted by the skunk nosing its way out and waited. The skunk sat there watching me and it was clear that it wasn’t going to move much as long as I was there. I went inside and about 5 minutes later I heard the clank of the door falling closed. The skunk was out and I went to try to find it with my camera to catch it uncaged, but it was gone by the time I could do so. Probably best that way, I suppose….
People often comment about how they can smell a skunk from a significant distance, even when it has not released its spray. And indeed I could actually smell the musk of this temporarily trapped skunk from 15 feet away, although it was clear he hadn’t actually sprayed, because that would have been like 20 times more nauseating. In doing the researching into the chemistry of skunk spray, I read that the musk they exude normally is different from the stuff they spray, and that is what people are smelling. However that “skunky” odor that we associate with dead ones on the road is quite likely to be the defensive spray, which is probably sharper and more potent still.
I also learned that evidently skunks are actually very cute and sometimes people keep them as pets. They can be quite tame if adopted from birth. Some people have the scent glands removed surgically, while others consider that unethical and just risk having the skunk spray when alarmed, which of course in tamed ones is not going to happen under normal circumstances. But if they run across a strange dog, for example, and the dog attacks, it could happen. Then again a scentless skunk tangling with a dog is a dead skunk, so I suppose it makes some sense that it would be considered unfair. Keeping them as pets is illegal an a number of states anyway, and mostly I’m just pondering what a pet skunk would be like….
Another unique feature of spotted skunks is that if they feel threatened, they will perform a handstand and face you with the white tail arched up over their backs. This is the last warning the skunk will give before spraying. Seems odd, yet effective as a “Keep your distance!” signal.
I have never had the opportunity to interact with a pet skunk, just a number of encounters with wild ones, like this: Back when I was about 11 or 12 years old, a group of kids from the neighborhood in Colorado I grew up in were watching model rocketry with one of the older teenagers that lived there too. They fired off the rocket over an alfalfa field and the big thing was for us younger kids to see who could catch the rocket as it drifted down to earth off in the distance.
Of course this necessitated a madcap scramble for positioning where we thought the rocket parachute would land, and it involved a lot of frenetic running. I am sure that you see what’s coming by now. In my mad dash to be first, I was in the lead of about 4 other kids, which meant that I was the first to come across the striped skunk in the knee-high alfalfa. As if it were waiting for us to arrive, the skunk already had its tail raised by the time I saw it, and it was much too late to avoid it, so I received a direct hit from maybe 6 to 8 feet away.
If this has never happened to you, let me verify that those thiols and thioacetates with the fancy chemical names are EXTREMELY effective at stopping you more or less instantly. My eyes burned and I almost threw up. No one else really suffered much of a hit. I felt somehow ashamed and of course everyone thought that this was the funniest thing of the year, which I suppose it was to everyone but me. Needless to say I didn’t get the rocket and I just went home and took several baths to try to get rid of the stench. My mother threw out the clothes I was wearing. Once was more than enough for me! (Dogs that had been sprayed happened twice more so I was indirectly contaminated again, but the direct hit I was graced with was by far the worst.)
Clearly thiol chemistry has proven to be a powerfully effective survival tool for the family, since nearly a dozen species of skunk have evolved to use it in both North and South America. Very few animals aside from a few large predatory birds like owls are willing to take on these small yet dis-stink-tive critters.