Silly skunk, your smell gives you away

So I know we have a skunk. I saw an adult crossing the road and I thought to myself, “Self, your garden is screwed!” I was not wrong, I saw most of my sweet corn crop go in a night. I actually think it was the raccoons, but when I saw a black and white tail also fleeing the scene of the crime it makes me wonder how I have any vegetables left at all.

Between the ‘coons, the groundhog, and now the skunks, my garden is getting tore up. Of course the story does not end there.

We live in a old new England farmhouse that was “built in 1900”, which means the town started keeping records in 1900. Who knows how old it really is. So I went down in to my field stone basement to do the laundry. Like normal I’m tidying up a bit as I go to come up stairs, so I pick up a plastic bag that had been used as a trash bag. There was no food in it because I do not want mice or any thing in it. But as I touch it something moves in the bag.

So of course I scream and freeze. My husband thunders down the stairs like a shot, ready to kill something. Seeing that I was not injured he asks what happened. As I point to the bag I said “There’s something in the bag! It’s icky and gross, get it!” The bag was still covering the beast so we had no idea what it was.

My husband points to one of my Tupperware cake carriers and motions for me to bring it over. I keep a lot of my cake pans and supplies in the basement, they don’t go bad down there and it keeps clutter out of our too small kitchen. I pass it over, and he puts the lid over the top of the critter, bag and all. Once it’s secure, he has me hold the top down and then he shimmies the bottom under it, not releasing the creature.We get it sealed.

With a sigh of relief, he picks it up and the critter starts to move around in the container. In it we see a black and white tail brush the walls. A baby skunk had wandered into our basement! My husband took it outside and very, very carefully released it in our gully without getting sprayed.

How’d it get in? We think the mother skunk had her babies under our porch, and there was a small hole in there that lead to the crawl space. We have fixed that now. But a few days later I was walking with my daughter around the yard, and the critter was still there! I took a picture and slowly walked away, with my heart in my chest, but smelling like roses. I know they don’t want to spray me, and if it misses, the reload time is long enough for me to get away. That being said I was not going to run up and pet his belly like we where best friends. Here’s what one looks like, in case you’ve never had a close encounter:

More garden adventures here.