[AT] OT - Skunks

Mike Meulenberg msm10301 at juno.com
Wed Mar 31 15:24:58 PDT 2010


Hi George,
I think coyotes will eat skunks. Another neighbor of ours has a son that is into tanning hides. Apparently it involves soaking the hide in various solutions and scraping it down with different tools. Recently his son shot a coyote,and when they started soaking the hide, it reeked of skunk. I think coyotes will eat anything they can manage to kill. Mike M


---------- Original Message ----------
From: "Best, George" <George_Best at adp.com>
To: Antique tractor email discussion group <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Subject: Re: [AT] OT - Skunks
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:48:41 -0500

We live out in the country will all sorts of critters living in the woods and visiting our house on a frequent basis.
We've had coons come around, especially when we used to set food outside for the cats, plus an occasional attempt to get the fish in our backyard pond.

After one episode of a coon tearing up our fish pond, I got a live trap, baited it and set it out by the pond.

Next morning I look out the window and the trap is sprung!  When I went out to see the coon I'd caught, my first thought was I'd caught the stray black/white cat we occasionally see around our place.  Nope..... it was a skunk!

I dispatched that skunk with the .22 and dumped the carcass out in the woods.  Killed it quick enough that the cage didn't have much smell to it so reset the trap the next night to try to catch the coon again.

Next morning the trap is sprung again!

Damn.... got another skunk.  Unfortunately, this one didn't go down as quickly as the first one and the cage was a bit smelly by the time it died.

Decided after the 2nd one to stop trying to catch the coon, besides the trap probably wasn't going to attract anything except skunks for awhile.

One thing that did surprise me a bit is the first skunk carcass was pretty well gone within 24 hrs, the second one disappeared just about as quick.  Other than a little bit of fur and tip of the tails something ate them up pretty quick.

We've got a lot of coyotes around but don't know if they would eat skunks or not.  We also have several great horned owls around our place and I do know that they kill and eat skunks as they have no sense of smell.  So it is possible that the owls cleaned them up.

We still occasionally see a skunk, but haven't seen a coon in quite awhile.  Of course since we no longer have any cats and there is no more pet food around our place they may be frequenting the neighbor places with better eating choices.

As for the fish pond, a heron pretty well cleaned us out last 4th of July.  We had some pretty nice size fish and all but two of them were gotten.  Those last two were gotten the next time we left the property.  Guess the heron was watching and waiting for us to leave to finish cleaning out the pond.  We learned the first time we lost all our koi fish to just buy feeder gold fish instead.  The 27 cent feeder gold fish had gotten to be 6-9" long and were doing pretty good until this last time.  A couple weeks after being cleaned out in the fish department, my wife noticed some activity in the pond,  we had hundreds of baby feed gold fish. So we're back in the process of growing food for another heron or coon.  Of course it will take a few years before they get big enough to make a good meal.


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