Meet the Animal Park's Striped Skunk

NATIVE RANGE

Striped skunks live in southern Canada down through northern Mexico in a variety of habitats including woodlands and grassland, as well as cultivated and agricultural land.

DIET

They are opportunistic omnivores that mostly eat insects during warm seasons and also will eat eggs, small vertebrates, and some vegetation. (Eating insects and some rodents makes them valuable to agriculture.)

BEHAVIOR

Striped skunks are primarily nocturnal or crepuscular, and are solitary except during breeding season. They have well-developed anal scent glands, with sulfur compounds responsible for the odor of their spray.

FASCINATING FACTS

• Skunks are peaceful, not aggressive, and would rather avoid conflict. If that’s not possible, before it sprays, a skunk will usually give a warning display: stamping its feet, arching its back, raising its tail. When a skunk is being pursued by a predator it cannot see (skunks have poor vision), it sprays in an atomized cloud the predator will run through; if the skunk can see the predator, it sprays a stream directly at its face—the stream is accurate up to 10 feet but can go twice that far.
• Their predators include great horned owls as well as coyotes, foxes, dogs, and bobcats. But many more are killed by diseases, parasites, winter starvation, and cars.
• Their scientific name “mephitis” comes from the Latin for “bad odor.”