Striped skunks turn up in 319 Indiana records scattered through 62 counties, with Monroe, Vigo, and Elkhart leading and Hoosier National Forest holding the largest single cluster. The map matches the animal’s taste for mixed country: field edges, brushy fencerows, and open woodland floor like the ground around Kankakee Sands and the state’s prairie preserves.
A digger after grubs
A skunk’s nose works a few inches off the ground, and its stout foreclaws dig out beetle grubs, cutworms, and the combs of ground-nesting bees and wasps, leaving the small conical holes that give a feeding skunk away. Insects and their larvae make up much of its warm-season diet, rounded out with mice, eggs, fallen fruit, and carrion. Its famous spray, held in reserve for real threats, lets this slow, nearsighted forager work the open without hurrying.
Out on mild nights, denning in the cold
Skunks do not hibernate, but in hard weather they den for days at a stretch, sometimes several sharing one burrow, and emerge on mild nights to forage. Indiana reports rise in March as breeding-season wanderers begin to roam, and again in late summer, when the year’s young strike out on their own.
Status in Indiana
NatureServe ranks the striped skunk S5, Secure, in Indiana, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
