Striped skunks appear in 1,849 New York records, led by Tompkins and Ulster counties, and the pattern is one of working landscapes: Finger Lakes farm country, Hudson Valley field edges, and the neighborhoods around Long Island’s pine barrens. This is an animal of edges and open ground, not deep forest.
An insect hunter with a famous last resort
For all its reputation, the skunk earns its keep quietly. Grubs, beetles, grasshoppers, and crickets make up much of its diet, with mice, eggs, and fallen fruit filling in, and its shallow, cone-shaped diggings in lawns and turf are the signature of a night’s work. The spray that makes it notorious is strictly a last resort. A cornered skunk stamps, hisses, and raises its tail long before it fires, and a person who reads those warnings rarely gets sprayed.
A last feeding push before winter
Reports stay strong through the growing season and top out in September, when the year’s young strike out on their own and every skunk feeds hard to build fat. A smaller rise in February tracks the breeding season, when males wander widely. Striped skunks do not truly hibernate, but they den through the coldest weeks, sometimes sharing a burrow, and sleep away storms, leaving December and January the thinnest stretch of the year.
Status in New York
NatureServe ranks the striped skunk S5, Secure, in New York, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
