Yipes! Stripes! Skunks and Raccoons

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The tail is up, you’ve been warned! The potent musk of the striped skunk can linger for weeks. ROLF NUSSBAUMER/ANIMALS ANIMALS

Woods-wise and city-smart, skunks and raccoons are among our nation’s most abundant and widely distributed wild mammals. That’s the good news — and the bad news. On the one hand, they’re charismatic creatures with fascinating natural histories and remarkable survival skills. On the other, they can be serious pests and carriers of potentially deadly diseases. To some, they’re just varmints: unwanted and unappreciated, the animal version of weeds.

With a closer look, though, you’ll find that the reasons behind the animals’ uneasy status have at least as much to do with us as them.

Mild-mannered Stinkers

To many humans a skunk is a skunk is a skunk, but the truth is North America can boast (or not) four different kinds: spotted, hog-nosed, hooded and striped. Until recently, all were considered members of the weasel family. But taxonomists now place them in their own family, Mephitidae, a name based on the Latin word for noxious stench.

Weighing in at just 1 or 2 pounds is the runt of the family, the spotted skunk. Sleek, slender and secretive, the spotted skunk is weasellike — it can climb trees like a squirrel — but there’s no mistaking its bushy-tailed black-and-white skunky looks. It’s not so much spotted as covered with blotchy, broken stripes. There’s a stink among biologists over whether there are two species — eastern and western — or whether they’re the same species, and never mind the geographics. In any case, spotted skunks of one kind or another are widely but lightly distributed across the contiguous United States (except the East Coast, Northeast and Great Lakes).

Some experts think that our least common skunk, the hog-nosed, also is two distinct species: again, eastern and western, and again, a case of taxonomical hair-splitting. Regardless, this skunk — a common resident of Mexico and Central America — barely pokes its naked pigletlike snout into the United States, venturing only as far as southern Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and the western tip of Oklahoma. The hooded skunk — so called for the long white hairs on its head and neck — also is a Mexican émigré, and shares the extreme southern borders of the hog-nosed’s range.

The aforementioned skunks have comparatively specific habitat preferences and aversions to humans. This is not the case with America’s other skunk: the ubiquitous striped skunk. No matter where you live in the continental United States (with the exception of Alaska and a few bone-dry areas in Southern California, Nevada and Utah), the striped skunk lives there, too. Stocky, short-legged and luxuriantly furred, the striped weighs up to 14 pounds, though eight to 10 is more usual, and is roughly the size of a long-haired house cat. Its markings vary, but typically a single white stripe starts at the neck and breaks into two stripes along the back, often converging at the rear to form a single white tail stripe.