Iowa’s 106 striped skunk records spread across 41 counties with no strong center, Story, Linn, and Harrison counties leading with single-digit counts each. The skunk is a common animal that is simply hard to count: strictly nocturnal, unhurried, and confident enough in its own defense to go about its business at a walk.
An omnivore that pays its way on the farm
Insects dominate a striped skunk’s diet, grubs, beetles, grasshoppers, and crickets, with mice, bird eggs, carrion, and fruit rounding it out. A foraging skunk leaves small conical diggings in turf where it has gone after grubs, a sign familiar to anyone with an Iowa lawn or pasture. It dens in abandoned burrows, brush piles, and the spaces under farm buildings and porches, moving between field, grassland edge, and town margin without much preference. Records run from the Decorah and the Driftless Area to Little Storm Lake Wildlife Management Area and the Loess Hills State Forest, the same mix of edge habitat from one side of the state to the other. Its famous spray is a last resort, delivered accurately and only after foot-stamping and a raised tail.
Not a hibernator, but a winter homebody
Reports crest in March, again in May and June, and once more in September. March is breeding season, when males range widely and skunks of both sexes are simply out more; autumn sends them foraging hard to build fat before the cold. Skunks do not truly hibernate, but in hard weather they den up, sometimes several together, and may stay underground for weeks at a stretch, so Iowa’s winter counts thin even where skunks remain close at hand.
Status in Iowa
NatureServe ranks the striped skunk S5, Secure, in Iowa, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
