Hooded skunks reach the United States only in its far southwest corner, and New Mexico’s Peloncillo Mountains, Animas Valley, and Gray Ranch sit right in that narrow sliver of Chihuahuan Desert country near the Mexican border. That’s rocky, brushy terrain with scattered ranches, a very different setting from the piñon-juniper mountains where striped skunks turn up across the rest of the state.
With just 13 records and a state rank of S2, Imperiled, this is a genuinely uncommon animal in New Mexico even though its worldwide status is secure. The most recent confirmed sighting on record dates to 2017, itself a sign of how rarely anyone documents this skunk here.
The few dated records cluster loosely around winter, but with counts this small, that pattern could just as easily be noise as a real seasonal signal.
Full species profile
