Maryland’s 168 striped skunk records spread widely but thinly across 20 counties, led by Frederick and Garrett, with named records as scattered as Greenbelt Park near Washington, Cedarville State Forest, and the Nanticoke River Wildlife Management Area on the Eastern Shore.
An insect hunter with a famous insurance policy
Under the stripes, a skunk is mostly a grubber of beetle larvae, grasshoppers, crickets, and other invertebrates, rounded out with mice, eggs, and fallen fruit, and the little cone-shaped diggings it leaves in lawns and meadows mark where it has been working. Its defense needs no introduction: a threatened skunk stamps its front feet, and if that warning goes unheeded it fires a musk that can carry several meters and linger for weeks.
Out in March, denning in the cold
Counts crest in March, the late-winter breeding season, when males roam well beyond their usual rounds, and again in June as newly mobile young skunks begin trailing their mother on her nightly circuit. Striped skunks are not true hibernators, but they den up, sometimes several to a den, through the coldest stretches of a Maryland winter and venture back out in thaws.
Status in Maryland
NatureServe ranks the striped skunk S5, Secure, in Maryland, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
