Spotting the elusive spotted skunk in Virginia.
Virginia Tech doctoral candidate Emily Thorne began her PhD research in 2014 with an interesting challenge: Nobody knew for certain if she’d be able to find the animal she was planning to study. A few recent trail-camera photos suggested tantalizing evidence of their presence. But no one one she spoke with in Virginia could recall a first-hand sighting in decades. Launching her project, Thorne kept her expectations low. “We never really expected to find many of them,” she says.
And then they did.
Over the coming years, she succeeded not only in finding, but also in learning much more about, the elusive subject of her study: the eastern spotted skunk. “It turns out that they are there, and you just need to know how to find them,” says Thorne. “We went from ‘Let’s see if they’re in Virginia,’ to finding out a whole lot of information about them.”
The skunk we’re familiar with in Virginia—if you’re a dog owner, perhaps too regrettably well—is the striped skunk, that ambling, house cat-sized mammal armed with a nuclear defense system. The spotted skunk is smaller (an adult is about the size of a large gray squirrel), faster, and far less common in the Commonwealth. But it can still raise a stink. The spotted skunk’s Latin name, Spilogale putorius, translates to “smelly spotted weasel,” according to Thorne, and she has ample experience to testify that the name is well-earned. In the course of her research, Thorne first deployed baited, motion-triggered cameras to identify where the skunks might be found, then later, used (no-harm) traps to capture some of the skunks, which she fitted with radio collars to track their movements. Getting the skunks out of the traps, however, “At first we got sprayed a lot,” she admits.
Thanks to that defense mechanism, spotted skunks seem to be relatively safe from predation by coyotes and bobcats; one photo captured from the cameras shows a bobcat lurking uneasily behind a tree as a spotted skunk appears to go about its business unconcernedly. Owls, on the other hand, are ambush predators that use surprise to their advantage, swooping in silently and readily picking off skunks, Thorne found. Some of the skunks she collared met that fate, and spotted skunks, she concluded “are most likely to be eaten by an owl before they die of old age.”
Thorne links this vulnerability to the apparent preference that spotted skunks in her study showed for a very particular habitat of lower-elevation forested areas along the Appalachian and Blue Ridge that have a lot of understory vegetation; the bushy cover of the understory provides protection from owls, which don’t like flying through dense forests. Yet this preference for a very specific habitat also came as a surprise in Thorne’s research, because, as she explains, spotted skunks are found throughout North America and thus are assumed to be generalists in terms of adapting to different habitats.
After collaring some two dozen skunks, Thorne and her research assistants were able to use the tracking data to place cameras where they knew the skunks were located, generating a rich body of behavioral information (and demanding hundreds of hours of time to scroll through the images). Fast-moving and agile, these skunks are skilled hunters, seeking out a huge variety of prey including small birds and mammals, frogs and salamanders, and insects like beetles and centipedes—even larvae from a ground-wasp nest. They are excellent climbers, and in mating season, Thorne found, tended to dens in hollows well above the ground in oak trees. But mothers with young (known as “kits”) preferred ground-level crevices or below-ground burrows, which Thorne attributes to the fact that young skunks are what mothers might call “a handful” and could too easily tumble from a nest in a tree.
“If you can imagine the craziest kitten and puppy you have ever seen, and then mix them into one animal, that is a baby spotted skunk,” says Thorne. “The kits play with each other, they play with other objects, they would play tug-of-war with the straps we used to tie cameras to the tree.”
What Thorne couldn’t determine through her research was the abundance or density of spotted skunks in the Commonwealth. She is excited that volunteers, through the Virginia Master Naturalists Program, have joined the effort to learn more about this species by taking part in the spotted skunk survey project and placing remote-triggered cameras throughout the state. (Learn more and see images from the project that reveal the diversity of Virginia’s wild creatures at VirginiaMasterNaturalist.org/spotted-skunk-survey.) This citizen-scientist effort, says Thorne, “is probably one of the coolest outcomes of this project—how much community interest is growing in these spotted skunks.”
