Driving along the other morning I saw one dead skunk and then another fifty feet further on. My wife said, “They must have been playing.”
A little later I said, “That was the fifth dead skunk in the past mile.”
She asked, “Is rabies back?”
I had been wondering the same thing, so I checked. Nope, none reported in Dupage County, Illinois, but there have been twelve rabid bats in the next county south.
So what else would cause so many skunks to get run over the same night? Which was around the time of the full moon. eery theremin music
Skunks are not the fastest creatures on earth, and they don’t typically have to worry about running from predators. Unfortunately, skunk spray has very little stopping power when it comes to motor vehicles.
on edit: Looks like I jumped the gun with my answer. Maybe a special skunk convention on the other side of the road?
I do know that some wildlife moves through cities in large waves – volkerwanderuung. Hereabouts, raccoons will flow into the cities – and leave their dead in the roads as evidence – and then recede again. I think it’s just another example of Kondratiev waves: population builds up, pressuring individuals to move. Genghis and Tamerlane were subject to the same effect.
It’s a given that skunks are blind, slow, and stupid so I’m going with Trinopus’ hypothesis as an explanation for why so many were blind, slow, and stupid at the same time. Anyway, it sounds more intellectual.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Highway Department worker. With most species, you can just stop, toss the carcass in the back of your truck, and be on your way. With a skunk carcass, you need to be more cautious, and perhaps go back to HQ for some long-handled tools so you don’t have to handle it directly. Or ignore it, and hope that the next shift will take care of it.
I’d suggest a statistical outlier. Once in a while they happen:
-keep rolling a dice, eventually you’ll roll sixes six times in a row. There’s nothing wrong with the dice.
-commercial airliner crashes are extremely rare. We can go for years without one, and then suddenly we get two or three in a single 12-month period, and people (or at least the media) start to wonder outloud whether we have a systemic safety problem with our aviation industry; with rare exception, this is usually not the case.
-sometimes two or three people in the same neighborhood will develop the same kind of cancer, and then suddenly people are insisting that this is a meaningful cancer cluster and that there must be some kind of environmental factor. Sometimes there is, but not usually when there’s just two or three cases.
So my guess would be that you just happened to have five freethinking, not-too-bright skunks who decided to cross the road on the same evening.
I wish they wouldn’t. I hit one on my motorcycle once, and the smell was so bad that I spent the next several minutes trying very hard not to barf in my helmet.
I want to hear more about this. Was it day or night? Did the skunk dart in front of your cycle at the last second, or did it freeze like a deer in the headlights and you couldn’t avoid it? When did it squirt? Did it squirt in the last second before you hit it, or did the force of the collision burst open the stink sac (or whatever they call it)?
Different kind of confirmation bias: You’re not seeing all of the OTHER roadkill in the middle of the street, because the carrion creatures are eating them.
Most carrion birds and animals around here ignore dead skunk. If there’s a squirrel or a turtle sniffle or God-save-them a whole deer - those things get fieldstripped within a day or two at most, but skunks will last until they rot off the road.
Skunks don’t hibernate, but they do go into torpor and may go into communal dens. You may have run a cross a group of them trying to build fat reserves for winter.
A Sunday morning, about 8:30 AM, riding on a two-lane rural road at about 55 MPH. He ran straight out from the left side of the road, essentially on an intercept course. Being so low to the ground he basically disappeared from view (blocked by the bike’s fairing) in the moments before impact, so I don’t know exactly what happened, whether he deliberately sprayed, or just got the stink knocked out of him. I never saw any blood on my bike, so whatever damage he sustained didn’t exactly tear him apart (although my buddy following behind me confirmed that the skunk didn’t move again after the impact).
I slowed before the impact, but there wasn’t much else to do. I wasn’t going to attempt any crazy evasive maneuvers; it would have been dumb to crash myself out just to avoid a skunk (or at least that’s what I thought before the smell hit me).
Thank you; I’ve always been fascinated by roadkilled skunks and appreciate a first-hand account. Especially from a motorcycle, as this affords a better view than a car.
So, how did the stink work? Did it just stink where it lay, so you had to ride far enough away to get out of range? Or did it actually get stink juice on your bike, your clothes, or both?
You tend to see more roadkill in the week or two after a daylight-saving-related clock change: The critters got used to patterns of automobile traffic, which has now shifted by an hour.
