Skunks are car bait

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Every now and then I’ll smell the odor of skunk while driving. Sometimes I’ll even see skunk remains on the road. I guess I never really thought about why there was so much skunk roadkill.

Until the morning I had to start work at 3AM, and was driving essentially in the middle of the night. Near my work on a 45 mph road, my peripheral vision becomes aware of a black blob moving slowly toward my car. Very rapidly, my headlights/vision focuses on the object- a skunk, waddling along a 4-lane highway. Very slowly. Startled, I swerve around the offending animal and narrowly avoid it. Now, I know why there are so many dead skunks on the road.

  1. They are black
  2. They are active at night
  3. They are SLOW AS ALL HELL crossing the street.

I was commenting about this to a co-worker, saying that it really seems like skunks are nature’s D-students when it comes to surviving road crossings. He replied, “well sure, but they get their revenge in the end!”

That they do :mad:

2

And they like salt, which is what they are often after when they’re waddling in the road.

3

I am with you, Incubus. My corner of NE Texas has the highway skunk scent at least every ten miles. To make it worse, I don’t see the any birds hurrying to clean up the dead skunks.

SSG Schwartz

4

Yep, skunks and them armored dildos. Reeaaal Slooooow!:p:p

5

PBS’s Nature recently had a show about skunks where this was explained. It turns out that the color pattern and defensive posturing of skunks are so effective at deterring predators that they apply the same strategy to cars on the road. Their first instinct is not to run, but to posture. This does not end well for the skunk. In fact, they note that the number one killer of skunks is cars.