Striped skunk???

People just don't live in the woods these days, and wildlife go through their generations so quickly (relatively) that they have no reason to fear humans. There is a major river which runs through Toronto, with many feeder creeks, making for one large valley and many extensive ravines. These are highways for wildlife which are neither familiar with nor afraid of humans. One either has to keep one's garbage in the house until trash collection day, build a critter-proof container for the trash cans, or be willing to clean up the mess every morning.

We've eliminated wolves, and foxes are no longer common. So many wild animals have no experience not only of humans, but of predation. They ain't impressed with ya.

Like I say, this one seemed peaceful enough that there's no reason to want to shoot him or anything, just curious as to howhe might have got here...

Well, one point i was trying to make is that many wild creatures (and especially small ones) have become "urbanized." There's lots of food in garbage cans, or just discarded on the street, and so many generations have grown up with no fear of man, or even of animal predators. We have skunks, possums and the vile raccoons here all over the place. According to CBC, the population density of raccoons for the entire province of Ontario is three per square kilometer--but the population density of raccoons in the city of Toronto is 150 per square kilometer. It's a giant buffet for them.

I live within 10 miles of Boston and I see the occasional skunk around here
as well. If it's at night, I'm OK with it. If I see one in the daytime, I call
our local animal control officer.

A commander of skunks in the form of a snake... Consider not putting out cat food if you want to see the good end of your skunks... Cats and skunks co-exist quite well regardless of Warner Bros, opinion...

People make pets of them all the time, and if smart have the stink glands removed which are exactly like the glands you and all mammels have in their asses to lubricate their **** as it exits the body... Theirs of course are modified to fire when ready, and I have never taken a direct hit, but only by the grace of God...

The thing that threw me off a bit was him not having the stripe down his back and I had to do a google search to figure out what the hell he was exactly. I'd never heard of a striped skunk previously.

You mean you've never heard of an unstriped skunk.

I think the name is from having two stripes down his sides rather than the one down his back and in some cases as per the image above, the two stripes can fade out sort of quickly while the white patch on the top of his head stands out. Sort of an exotic animal.

Ah how cute! There are tons of skunks in the area I live in. Boston has lots of them. I'd imagine - DC would as well.

My brother once got sprayed when he hit one while riding his bike and my neighbors dog got sprayed too.

To me the only odd thing is he is out during the day - they are like raccoons out and about at night. Both those incidents above occurred at night.

And one caution - they do love cat food so don't leave any out unless you want to encourage him keep coming.

Same as my experience south of Boston....

And if you want to get rid of the pesky guy

http://www.tenlist.com/skunk-control/washington-DC/

Lotta skunks around Cambridge, MA, across the river from Boston--not high density urban like NYC but definitely urban. They don't seem to be striped--maybe that's just Walt disney cartoons. Ours tend to have big white blotches on their backs instead, nothing stripe-y.

Used to see a racoon family, mom and three or four kits, coming across the street to sample our garbage cans. They're good at lifting the lids to get inside. Coyotes living in surrounding towns, suburbs. And I saw a fox trotting thru Lesley College one night.

Coming home late one night, a racoon came down the driveway of one of the Harvard residential houses where upperclassmen live, walked calmly across the street, and up the front sidewalk of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I was waiting to see if it went inside and a light went on in an office, but the stoplight changed before it got up to the door. Always wondered if it had tenure.

Not to mention possums, pigeons, a couple kinds of hawks, and the Canada geese who've stopped flying south for the winter and taken up permanent residence in some northern cities. One night a month ago saw some kind of heron standing asleep in the Muddy River three blocks from Fenway Park, a hundred feet from the park playing fields which two hours before were filled with basketball and soccer players.

Seems to be a lot of wildlife figuring out how to live next to us.

hmmmm.

my skunk has a distinct double stripe all the way to his fuzzy tail...

Oh, god, I was just thinking of the summer right after I got out of high school. I'd broken my kneecap and had a huge plaster cast on my right leg, so I stayed home in suburbanNJ while my family went on vacation in New Mexico. Our dog caught a skunk under the neighbors' convertible and it sprayed him and the car, and I had to call my dad in NM to call the neighbors and straighten it out, and then walk half a mile into the shopping district with a right leg which couldn't bend to get tomato juice to wash the dog, and mysaelf after I washed him,and then try to keep him in the damned tub when I could hardly move myslef. Tomato juice does work, though. That's not just an old wives' tale. Looking back, I guess urban wildlife isn't that new a phenomenon.

Stripes, blotches, or all black, if it looks like a skunk and walks like a skunk (animated rug going down the street) it's a skunk.

We've got skunks, raccoons, and coyotes in the Big Apple. I don't know what else is invading. Raccoons and coyotes are doing quite well here. Don't know about the skunks.

I recently saw a film about skunks. They rarely back off from anybody. Who would bother them?

BTW, there are four kinds of skunks in this hemisphere. One is the striped skunk (the most common). Two of the other kinds resemble the striped skunk. The fourth kind is the spotted skunk.

Yes, we now see a lot of that here, too, in parts of Oz.
But often wildlife has no choice in the matter.
I don't know of this is what has happened in & around your city, but where I live, wildlife has lost so much of its traditional "green wedge" habitat (due to extensive development (caused by rapid population growth).
So it's either perish or coexist with humans, as well as possible.
There is simply nowhere else to go, poor critters.

Also, during the extremes of the extended drought we experienced recently in SE Australia, wildlife was forced into the cities for food:



http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070718-roos-drought.html

As I noted, this little guy appeared polite and well-mannered and as such, he got fed and invited back. He didn't get petted...

Likewise I've had Russians tell me that the little brown bears you see in Russian circuses are naturally tame and that in tsarist times they typically got fed at peasant cottages and carried water for the workers in the fields and actually helped with farm work.