Striped skunks hold 415 New Jersey records, and the map tilts toward the state’s most urbanized ground: Hudson, Bergen, and Middlesex counties lead the list, with Liberty State Park and Palmyra Cove Nature Park among the named places.
A neighbor that dines on grubs
The skunk is an omnivore with a specialty, digging beetle grubs and other insects out of the soil with its long front claws, leaving the small conical holes that appear overnight in lawns. Small rodents, eggs, fruit, and carrion fill out the menu. That diet, plus a willingness to den beneath sheds, porches, and woodpiles, makes the skunk one of the few wild mammals that genuinely gains ground in suburbia. It is also famously reluctant to waste its spray, stamping and raising its tail as fair warning before resorting to it.
A winter den, not a winter sleep
Skunks do not truly hibernate, but in the coldest weeks they hole up in dens, sometimes several females sharing one, and emerge during mild spells to forage. New Jersey’s reports thin sharply in January and climb again through spring, when the breeding season begins, with a second rise in August and September as the year’s young strike out on their own. In a state where winter rarely locks the ground for long, some skunk stays active in nearly every month.
Status in New Jersey
NatureServe ranks the striped skunk S5, Secure, in New Jersey. The species is native to the state, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous.
Full species profile
