Emily Thorne, now a wildlife biologist on the Blue Ridgeway Parkway, spent six years collecting information about the distribution and habitat of eastern spotted skunks while pursuing a doctorate at Virginia Tech. She explains that there is a key difference in the habitat requirements of the two species.

“Striped skunks are what we consider opportunistic and generalists,” Thorne says. “They can live pretty much anywhere and eat basically anything. And they’ve actually done really well and thrived in urban environments.” 

According to Thorne, spotted skunks were at one point thought to be the same kind of generalists.

“But the more we learn about them, the more we realize they’re particular about their habitat,” Thorne says. “I suspect that they’re a conditional specialist where they require very specific habitat features, but during particular times of the year.”

Spotted skunks are much smaller than their striped counterparts. Males, on average, weigh about a pound and are 18 inches long, with a third of that being their tail. That makes them about five times smaller than the striped skunk and more vulnerable prey than their lumbering cousins.

For both species of skunks, the primary predator is the great horned owl and smaller owls. But the spotted skunk is more reliant on its habitat for protection.

“They prefer early succession to mid-succession hardwood forests, like mixed pine-hardwoods, specifically ones dominated by oak,” Thorne says. “They’ll den in tree cavities created by either rot or woodpeckers, and they’re almost always in oak trees.”

The skunks rely on areas with understory shrubs like mountain laurel and rhododendron as cover from predators, according to Thorne. She also found that their denning behavior changes with the seasons.

“During winter, we almost always tracked them high up into trees,” Thorne says. “During the summer, when females have kits, they are always underground in a dirt burrow. We suspect that the temperature and humidity is a lot more stable, [and] they’re safe from predators.”

The next stage is a rocky outcrop where the kits can run and still have easy access to cover.

“These conditional specialist requirements for habitat, depending on reproductive state and time of the year, were really cool, that we didn’t expect to find,” Thorne says.

The spotted skunk’s decline reflects the loss of its habitat. A paper detailing the distribution of eastern spotted skunks in Virginia, finds them mostly in isolated populations west of the Blue Ridge Mountains at high and middle elevations. These colonies are small and patchy, Thorne reports, and habitat fragmentation has kept them separated.

Thorne estimates 20 to 30 skunks at the best habitat site she researched.

“Some of the higher elevation, less productive sites with less food, less habitat available, smaller habitat patches, it was probably around 10,” she says.

Despite reported decline, the eastern spotted skunk is not federally listed as endangered, though some states do have protections. Thorne says that it is deserving of conservation attention. A major factor in establishing effective conservation efforts is learning where the skunks are.

If you see a spotted skunk in the woods, you can help researchers by reporting it at EasternSpottedSkunk.weebly.com.