Eastern spotted skunks are small, agile predators known for handstand threat displays before they spray, and they den in brush piles, rock crevices, and hollow logs rather than open burrows. Texas has only 9 records for this subspecies group, but it carries real conservation weight: NatureServe ranks it S2, Imperiled, in the state, a sharper decline than the G4 global rank suggests, and the IUCN lists the species Vulnerable worldwide.
Those records are scattered across six counties, from Harris, Waller, and Austin counties in and west of Houston to Coleman and Tom Green in west-central Texas and Jeff Davis in the Trans-Pecos, which reflects a historically wide but now patchy range rather than one core population. None of them come from iNaturalist, and no month logs more than two, far too few to show a seasonal pattern.
That gap between a secure global rank and an imperiled state rank is the more telling number here than any single place on the list.
Full species profile
