A meeting with Skunk

 

Skunk and I met again earlier this week, our 4th encounter in as many months. And as usual, skunk looked in need of a helping hand. The first time we met they’d just fallen in the icy Wendigo Pond and had wandered onto the nearby road, disorientated, where they’d laid down on the warm tarmac trying to regain body heat. I’d directed traffic around them for 10 minutes or so until they’d felt ready to carry on. Another time they’d fallen through the ice of Grenadier Pond - probably a hole made by ice fisherman as the rest of the ice all around was thick enough to skate on - and another chap had helped them out. And this last time they were cornered by a dog, who’s human was watching from a distance, unable or unwilling to get the dog under control.

Now, skunk had it’s back to the dog and tail raised, indicating that it was going to spray. Skunks have two anal scent glands and when trying to defend themselves they can spray a foul-smelling liquid from these glands. The smell is apparently so awful it scares away almost all potential threats.

‘Be careful,’ said a hiker from afar, ‘you’re really close and it’s going to spray!’ Skunks can direct their spray accurately about 6 feet (the spray can continue less accurately to about 10 feet) and I was about 4 feet away. But I was overjoyed at seeing skunk again - when it’d been pulled out the pond it was shivering badly, the temperature was around -10C and I really didn’t know if it could regain enough body heat to survive the night. So to see it now, a couple of months later, alive and perhaps a little larger than last time, I was so happy.

Now, I can’t be exactly sure it was the same skunk. It was in the same area of the park as I’ve seen it each time before. It had the same slightly diseased eyes, right side worse than the left. There was a bald patch above it’s left eye, and the stripe on it’s nose looked similar (this stripe changes slightly in each skunk, as the face markings of many other animals like raccoons or blue jays do also). So hence my thought it was the same animal, although it could have been parent or sibling. The 1st photo was taken in January, the 2nd during this meeting.

I’ve never been afraid of skunks, never known why people are so bothered by the smell. So instead of moving away I stayed put and observed the situation. Skunk was making the motions of preparing to spray but despite the dog lunging violently at it nothing was happening, and this made me think it was in trouble. Skunks can only spray 5 times before they have to recuperate, and that rest period might take up to 10 days. So if it‘d already been hassled several times in the proceeding days and had to spray to stay alive it wouldn’t now have any spray left for the moment, nor the capacity to defend itself.

I hesitated a few minutes before acting. These days you never know, people (even dog owners) can be so angry about just about anything. But having thought it out I decided that skunk should be free to wander around without hassle and that the dog should have been kept under control - this wasn’t in the off-leash area of High Park - so if the owner wasn’t going to do anything about it, it was up to somebody else to do the right thing. I wasn’t about to see skunk stressed out even more, or even torn to pieces, so I just gave the owner a firm nod, walked up to the dog, which was now about 2 ft from skunk and lunging and barking like it was possessed, and grabbed it firmly by it's scruff. The dog was fine, didn’t object at all, and I took it back to its owner and asked them to put it on the lead and walk away, which they did.

I stayed around, taking some photos as skunk had a drink in a puddle and rustled around in the leaves. Minutes later another dog owner arrived and, looking at skunk, said,
‘Oh yeah, I thought there was a skunk around, I smelt it when I was over the other side of the hill…’ 

Now, this same thing happens every time I’m with skunk. Somebody says they smelt it from a long way away. A High Park staff member had said it to me after skunk had fallen in the lake, and she was over a km away. And this has always perplexed me, as I never smell anything at all. I’d thought, perhaps it’s a Canadian thing, and you have to be born here to be able to smell it or recognise it. Or maybe they’re all just exaggerating. 

When I got home I googled it and found that because I can't smell skunk at all, I’m probably immune to the smell of skunk spray. Just like 15% of us are unaffected by touching poison ivy, there's a much smaller group of people - about one in 1,000 - who can’t detect the smell of a skunk. The condition is known as specific anosmia (also known as smell blindness), which is the inability to smell one particular odor. It can be for any smell, and for me, it just happens to be skunk.

I left skunk as they settled down for a nap in the leaves. It was nice meeting skunk again, hopefully next time we see each other it will be under less stressful circumstances!