I bought a striped skunk skull online from a man named Terry. It arrived yesterday from Duluth, Minnesota, in a nondescript cardboard box that weighed almost nothing. I opened the box and removed the skull from a cocoon of bubble wrap.

I hold it in my hand now. It鈥檚 much smaller than I expected. It fits comfortably on the screen of my smartphone. I sit at my desk, turning the skull over to inspect its ridged surfaces, tracing my finger along the delicate zygomatic arches. I count its white teeth.

Meanwhile, at the end of my overgrown backyard, beneath a small garden shed, skunks are sleeping among the roots, hidden in the cool earth, waiting for the night to come.

In my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, a pleasantly average city of 190,000 residents that sits two and a half hours northeast of Chicago, nothing too exciting ever seems to happen. But in the hot summer months, a thick, immovable cloud of skunk odor envelops the entire city. Skunks are everywhere. I have seen them ambling up my driveway at night toward my trash cans鈥攍ike sturdy black cats, marked with two broad white stripes that run the length of their oil-black sides. My neighbors Cindy and Monty Burch own a dog鈥擱obinson, an affable brown Labrador鈥攖hat was sprayed by skunks nine times in the summer of 2012 and five times the summer before that. Dog owners across the city have experienced the same problem. Only the trees are safe鈥攕triped skunks are reluctant climbers.

[quote]鈥淚f you build it, they will come,鈥� Luanne Johnson says. 鈥淧eople love a vegetation border around their house, with a mini forest separating them from their neighbors. That's ideal for skunks.鈥漑/quote]

Last October, when Wayne Weeks set traps in his Grand Rapids yard to catch the squirrels that nest in his roof, he accidentally caught a skunk instead. His four-year-old son thought it was a kitten and asked to play with it. Jaya Neal Rapp鈥檚 two dogs were sprayed by a skunk that visited her yard to eat the fruit that fell from a neighbor鈥檚 overhanging mulberry tree. I even heard a story about a local woman on her way home from a hair salon who tried to shovel a dead skunk from the road outside her house and was sprayed in the face by its still-active reflexes.

Thirteen years ago, when my neighbor Cindy moved to Eastown, a Grand Rapids suburb on the east side of the city, there were no skunks, she says鈥攐r at least she never saw any. Suddenly, four years ago, skunks were everywhere.

Many of my neighbors have begun talking about a plan to organize against the skunks. They want the animals eradicated, and they want the city to do it for them. On the well-kept sidewalks of East Grand Rapids, when residents meet, they talk about the rotten lingering stink of skunks鈥攁 smell that clings to everything and settles in the low-lying parts of town like dirty water.

The skunk explosion isn鈥檛 just happening in Grand Rapids. Across the United States, skunks are infiltrating urban areas in astounding numbers. We are colliding with them, and they are colliding with us. 鈥淲e鈥檙e spreading out more,鈥� says Jerry Dragoo, a biologist at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, who has spent his career researching skunks. 鈥淚 get a lot of calls from rural areas, but I get them from the middle of towns as well. Concrete. Pavement. We have encroached on a lot of their habitat, but they鈥檙e very adaptable. They do well in human habitats. We provide them with food, water, and shelter. They鈥檒l eat just about anything. If you feed your dog or cat outside, they鈥檒l take advantage of that. They move in under sheds and things.鈥�

The striped skunk, by far the most common but not the only skunk in North America, has one of the largest ranges of any skunk species鈥攁n enormous region extending southward from British Columbia and Hudson Bay in the north through the United States to northern Mexico. It is present in every state except Hawaii and Alaska. No habitat beneath elevations of around 13,000 feet is considered unlivable.

Existing near humans suits skunks, says Luanne Johnson, a conservation biologist who studies them on Martha鈥檚 Vineyard. 鈥淚f you build it, they will come,鈥� she says. 鈥淧eople love a vegetation border around their house, with a mini forest separating them from their neighbors. That鈥檚 ideal for skunks. They sleep in those areas or under decks and come out at night and cruise the yard and eat birdseed and dog poop.鈥�

In 2009, The New York Times in Manhattan. A migration has begun, with the animals crossing the Harlem River from the Bronx and arriving at the northern tip of Manhattan鈥攁 place where skunk numbers previously had been low. Their populations exploded. They now are sighted regularly on the Jersey shore.

In August 2013, on the West Coast, employees reported seeing skunks in Dodger Stadium, in the concretized sprawl of downtown Los Angeles. 鈥淲hen I鈥檓 here at midnight, I see whole families come in, mamas and papas, the whole bunch,鈥� a Dodgers employee told the Los Angeles Times.

Parts of Illinois are inundated with record numbers of skunks. Statewide, 11,500 problem skunks were reported in 2011鈥攁 33 percent increase over 2010, a year that saw a 46 percent increase over the year before it. An animal-control specialist in Palatine, a northwestern suburb of Chicago, that he sometimes traps 15 skunks a day.

Stanley Gehrt already knows this. A wildlife specialist at Ohio State, Gehrt says skunks are ascendant, at least in the states he studies. 鈥淭he Great Lakes states,鈥� he says. 鈥淲isconsin, obviously. Indiana at the border of Illinois. Ohio. Most of the upper Midwestern states, and Michigan, too.鈥�

If a circle is drawn around this region, Grand Rapids sits at its epicenter鈥攍ike the bull鈥檚-eye of a dartboard.

I鈥檓 a molecular biologist, so the moment I realize I have skunks living in my 鈥▂ard, I become obsessed with them. Within a few weeks, I have the skunk skull on my desk, a stack of articles on skunks, and a copy of The Biology of the Striped Skunk, by B. J. Verts鈥攖he definitive textbook on the animal, published in 1967. (In fact, it鈥檚 the only textbook on the striped skunk.) I鈥檓 waiting for a bottle of skunk essence to arrive in the mail. In my spare time, I read archived news stories on skunks. Among my favorite headlines: 鈥溾�� (2012), 鈥溾�� (2008), and 鈥溾�� (1995).

Most important, I have become nocturnal. Each night, I stand on the deck that looks out on my backyard. I lean expectantly over the wet grass, like a whaler on the prow of a boat. And I watch for skunks.聽

The skunk is a superlative animal. On arriving in the New World and meeting them for the first time, early naturalists referred collectively to members of the skunk family as the stinkards. With the exception of two distantly related species of stink badgers, found only in Asia, the skunk is native to the Americas. They are classified as a distinct family鈥攁 group of 11 carnivorous mammals known as the Mephitidae鈥攚ith each species occupying its own distinct range and, in some cases, sharing territory.

[quote]One rainy night, I watch a 30-second, slow-motion YouTube clip of a skunk spraying in extreme close-up. Once seen, the footage can never be unseen.[/quote]

鈥淭here are five species north of Mexico,鈥� explains Dragoo, who calls himself a mephitologist. 鈥淵ou have the striped skunk, which is Mephitis mephitis, and then you have the hooded skunk, which is primarily Central American, but it does get into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and that鈥檚 Mephitis macroura. Then there are two spotted skunks鈥攖he eastern form and the western form鈥攁nd those are Spilogale putorius and Spilogale gracilis. And then we also have the white-backed hog-nosed skunk, which is Conepatus leuconotus.鈥�

Location is everything, Dragoo says. The skunks beneath my shed can only be striped skunks; no other species ventures this far north. The ranges of eastern and western spotted skunks go farther south and are circumscribed, slightly overlapping east of the Continental Divide. But the striped skunk is found almost all over the U.S., feeding voraciously on everything from beetles, squirrels, and frogs to bird eggs, berries, grains, human-generated garbage, and animal feces. A small animal鈥攎ales average six pounds, females four pounds or so鈥攕kunks achieve population densities that can range from 0.1 to 38 individuals per square kilometer.

Skunk numbers are at their highest in late summer, when recently born juveniles begin to explore their habitat. They have almost no predators鈥攁 potential meal that makes a predator reek for a month has diminishing returns. Coyotes, foxes, and great horned owls will eat a skunk, but only to avoid death by starvation. Even so, in the wild, skunks don鈥檛 live long: a four-year-old is a wise old anomaly.

Across the country, 2013 could have been named Year of the Rabid Skunk. In mid-July, an article in the Vermont Standard carried the headline 鈥�.鈥� Walking along a quiet road, an 84-year-old man noticed a skunk following close behind; when he lost his footing, the skunk attacked, biting him repeatedly on the ankles. One week later, a five-month-old child was bitten on the face by a rabid skunk at a Little Falls, Minnesota, day-care facility. 鈥淗e got bit a number of times,鈥� the county sheriff . 鈥淚t was an unusually large skunk, almost the size of, probably, a cocker spaniel.鈥� The following week, a woman visiting a Six Flags amusement park in Massachusetts was bitten by a rabid skunk.

Reports continued to come in from across the country: rabid skunks turned up in Boulder, Colorado, for the first time in 50 years; a 15-year high in the number of rabid skunks in Missouri; skunk rabies on the rise in North Carolina; rabid skunks in Arizona. In August, the Ohio Department of Health began a vaccination program, setting baits laced with rabies vaccine across a 4,334-square-mile region of the eastern part of the state. Similar efforts were under way in parts of Texas. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was testing a rabies vaccine in several states.

鈥淲e do see about a five-year cycle in the number of rabid skunks reported nationally,鈥� says Jesse Blanton, an epidemiologist for the . 鈥淭he last peak was around 2009, 2010, so we may be just beginning to see cases fluctuating upward.鈥�

Rabies in skunks means only one thing: lots of skunks. 鈥淪kunk populations rise until the point where some disease comes in, rabies or distemper or perhaps something else,鈥� says Philip Myers, a biologist at the University of Michigan.

鈥淲hen the populations are really dense, the disease is transmitted quickly from animal to animal, and the population is knocked back,鈥� Myers adds. 鈥淲hen it鈥檚 knocked back far enough, transmission stops, the disease disappears for a while, and the population builds back up. That cycle just repeats.鈥�

The skunk's Latin names are revealing. The striped skunk鈥檚 name of Mephitis mephitis is derived from Mefitis, the Roman goddess of noxious vapors. The putorius in the spotted skunk鈥檚 Spilogale putorius is from the Latin putere鈥攖o stink or be rotten.

One rainy night, I watch a 30-second, of a skunk spraying in extreme close-up. Once seen, the footage鈥攖aken from a 2009 Nature program called 鈥攃an never be unseen.

The skunk鈥檚 anus, looming on the screen as large as a planet, flexes with a single muscular contraction鈥攔olling outward, slowly everting. The scent glands emerge from it, one on either side. Dark and rounded, they resemble kidney beans. Each gland releases a high-powered geyser of yellow liquid, the color of egg yolk.

It aerosolizes into a fine mist.

鈥淚鈥檓 a chemical ecologist,鈥� says William Wood, a professor emeritus at Humboldt State University, in Northern California. 鈥淚鈥檓 interested in how chemicals carry messages in nature.鈥�

Wood has spent more time studying the chemical composition of skunk spray than anyone alive. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a fairly unique odor,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know any way to describe it other than a rotten-egg odor or a thiol odor.鈥�

On the desk in front of me as I talk to Wood sits a small glass screw-top jar. Inside the jar is the wax-sealed bottle of skunk scent I鈥檇 ordered from Buck Stop Scents and Lures, of Stanton, Michigan, a hunting-supply company. A day before, I removed the bottle from the jar and shook it, watching the viscous liquid swirl around. I open the bottle. The moment I break the wax seal, the pungently aggressive odor of rotten eggs fills the room. With my nose over the bottle, I gag. For the next hour, my stomach lurches and rumbles. It鈥檚 the familiar smell that wafts into my room late at night after a dog has tangled with a skunk in a nearby backyard.

A skunk can spray more than ten feet, aiming it precisely in twin, threadlike streams.

鈥淚t can be emetic,鈥� Luanne Johnson says. 鈥淚t can cause temporary blindness. It鈥檚 disorienting, and it totally disables your sense of smell. A predator can no longer function as a predator for a period of time if it gets a good hit.鈥�

I ask Wood what it is about these thiol-rich chemical compounds that make such a distinctive smell. 鈥淭hey fit into an odor receptor in our nose,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the sulfur that does it.鈥�

The most efficient way to remove skunk odor from clothing, says Wood, is to wash it in a mixture of one cup of bleach per gallon of water. For pets, wash them in a quart of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide, a quarter-cup of baking soda, and a teaspoon of liquid soap.

Wood believes humans are sensitive to the compounds in skunk spray for an important reason: they act as an environmental messenger.

鈥淗ydrogen sulfide is found in areas that don鈥檛 have oxygen,鈥� he says, 鈥渁nd I think, evolutionarily, as oxygen breathers, this is a signal that there is no oxygen in the air there, or in the mud, or wherever it is.鈥�

My stomach lurches again.聽

I attend a skunk-related meeting at the Eastown Community Association building. Five or six of us sit around a wooden table, describing recent skunk encounters, while Lindsey Ruffin, executive director of the association, scribbles notes. When a retired local attorney suggests paying a $50 bounty for every skunk tail collected, I keep my head down. A few weeks later, we set up an e-mail address for residents to report skunk sightings. The messages arrive slowly at first, then in a flood: skunks in yards every night, skunks spraying dogs, skunks sitting proudly atop trash cans.

In winter, snow and ice blankets everything in Grand Rapids. But the skunks remain active. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e not true hibernators,鈥� says Luanne Johnson. 鈥淭hey go into a torpor, and they鈥檒l reduce their metabolism for a period of time when it鈥檚 really cold out.鈥�

If temperatures climb above 20 degrees, they emerge to find food. In still-frozen backyards they鈥檒l target birdseed, slices of leftover pizza, and compost bins overflowing with vegetables.

鈥淪kunks sleep in groups for the winter, because of their body heat, and it鈥檚 usually one male and however many females he secures,鈥� says Johnson. 鈥淗e has this little harem that he keeps for the winter.鈥�

A skunk can lose half its body weight during the cold months. In February they emerge. After mating in March, females give birth in May to litters of two to ten mouse-size kits. One year, local exterminator John Benson tells me, he trapped a female skunk with a litter of eight. 鈥淭hat was the biggest one I鈥檝e ever had,鈥� he says.

A lot of my neighbors would like the elected officials of Grand Rapids to approach the increase in skunk numbers aggressively, like a few other cities have. In 2011, Avalon, New Jersey, had a serious skunk problem. Located on Seven Mile Island鈥攁 barrier island off the Jersey coastline鈥擜valon was teeming with the animals. Locals had had enough. Mayor Martin Pagliughi employed trappers to haul the skunks away. 鈥淲e鈥檙e trapping them and putting them in the witness protection program,鈥� he . 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know where they鈥檙e going.鈥�

In fact, Pagliughi had begun removing skunks around 2009. Back then trappers had relocated approximately 80 skunks, releasing many of them across the water in Upper Township, New Jersey, infuriating residents. After a request from Upper Township mayor Richard Palumbo, Pagliughi agreed to stop releasing skunks there.

Last summer, officials in Vernon Hills, Illinois, hired a trapper to thin skunk populations there. But most cities seem to stay out of it.

Is eradication even possible in Grand Rapids?

鈥淲e don鈥檛 have a program as a city, nor, as far as I know, does the county have any program,鈥� says Grand Rapids mayor George Heartwell. 鈥淚t surely isn鈥檛 a good time to be talking about the city adding new enforcement programs when we鈥檙e trying to figure out how to live within our means.鈥�

Still, many nights, Heartwell tells me, like other people across the city鈥攊n Heritage Hill and Alger Heights or to the south in the city of Kentwood鈥攈e or his wife closes their bedroom window because of the smell of skunks wafting inside.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 want to be so cavalier as to say we just have to learn to live with it,鈥� Heartwell says. 鈥淏ut I think that individuals or neighborhoods are going to have to take action on their own using private-sector pest-control companies.鈥�

It's a few minutes before midnight. A full moon lights the tree trunks. I stand on my deck, watching over the strange stillness of a city backyard at night. At around 9:30 a few nights earlier, as I carried a bag of trash outside, a skunk exploded from beneath one of the ferns in my yard, white stripe visible along its flank like a Nike swoosh. It ran along a fence, weasel-like, before disappearing into a thick wall of foliage.

It was one of the skunks that lives beneath my shed. I am watching for it now. Perhaps it is out scouring for food. Maybe it is dead. In a typical year, approximately 30 percent of skunks will die of disease鈥攔abies or distemper, overrun by ticks or internal parasites. Another third will die of human-related causes, like being hit by a car or trapped by an exterminator. After a half-hour, a solid-looking opossum wanders out from the undergrowth instead, slipping between the shadows. An hour later I go to bed.

But in the morning I smell skunk again. My Honda Pilot鈥擨 had considered it an unthreatening presence鈥攚as sprayed by a skunk in the night. As I load my kids into the car, a noxious cloud fills the interior: the sulfurous, cloying smell of rotten eggs, garlic, and marsh gas.

We drive wordlessly to school. The smell is still there when I pick my kids up in the afternoon.

Jerry Dragoo, who has a poor sense of smell, is unable to smell skunks, a discovery he made decades ago as an undergraduate student. He鈥檇 been dispatched to the southern part of New Mexico for fieldwork, where part of his job was trapping them.

鈥淚 managed to catch one, and it sprayed me,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t wasn鈥檛 that big a deal. I 鈥╰hought, What鈥檚 everybody so concerned about? Three days later, when I went back to class, they wouldn鈥檛 let me in the building.鈥�

For Dragoo, getting sprayed is an occupational hazard. He has been sprayed so many times, he now remembers only superlative instances. 鈥淚 was sprayed by one animal nine times in eleven seconds,鈥� he says with pride.

鈥淎 half-hour later it sprayed me again, three more times.鈥�

Don VandenBos leans over an ancient rust-pocked chest freezer and hands me a still-warm skunk carcass. As I take the skunk and hold it like a baby, VandenBos, who operates a Grand Rapids Critter Control franchise, walks absentmindedly around his workshop, which smells of motor oil and skunks. In the workshop, a multitude of narrow wire traps is stacked against the walls.

A few minutes earlier, VandenBos had taken a trap, with the skunk inside, and lowered it carefully into a large garbage can primed with carbon dioxide gas. Early that morning, he tells me, a homeowner in East Grand Rapids had managed to trap the skunk, then realized he didn鈥檛 know what to do with it.

鈥淲e get that about once a week,鈥� he says. 鈥淪omebody will catch a skunk鈥攕urprise the heck out of them鈥攁nd they don鈥檛 know what to do. I don鈥檛 advise putting it in your car. I鈥檝e done it. Put it in my wife鈥檚 car.鈥�

He stops and makes a sour face. 鈥淣ot a good thing,鈥� he says.

The best way to eliminate problem skunks, says VandenBos, is to board up crawl spaces beneath the structures where they make their dens and ensure there are no food scraps or birdseed for them to eat. It鈥檚 better to let an animal-removal expert trap and dispose of a problem skunk. Don鈥檛 try this at home.

The skunk is a small juvenile male weighing perhaps two pounds, probably born earlier this year. We inspect it. Fleas crawl through its black, burr-filled fur. Its nose is caked with dried mud. I pull its lips away from its white teeth. When I grab it around the scruff of the neck to move it, I think I feel a distant pulse throb from somewhere in its thick body. On its shoulders are two thin white stripes, like faint parentheses鈥攅ach a few inches long, almost not there at all.

鈥淵ou鈥檒l find everything from solid white to solid black,鈥� VandenBos says, pointing to the markings on its back.

Tall, skinny, and sixty-something, VandenBos bends over the skunk again, trying to show me its scent glands. I take a step backward. As he pulls and kneads at the skin around the anus, I put a storage rack between the skunk and me. Eventually, to my relief, VandenBos gives up.

鈥淎s soon as this body turns chilly,鈥� he says, 鈥渢hem fleas are going to start jumping.鈥� He puts the skunk in a plastic bag, opens the chest freezer, and places it inside, where it joins a confusion of other bulging bags.

A few days after meeting VandenBos, my wife and I stand at a window at midnight, watching a skunk loitering in our driveway. Its back is almost completely white鈥攖wo stripes that merge into one wide band.聽

Summer is now upon us in Grand Rapids, and the battle is being fought again. It takes place in parks and backyards, and in the shady, half-forgotten, garbage-choked spaces behind apartment buildings. The lines are drawn. If the summer is long and dry, and food is scarce, hungry skunks will pour from the outskirts into the city, like worms migrating from rain-filled soil. And if their population densities are high enough, perhaps rabies or distemper outbreaks will ignite, spreading through the streets to keep them at bay. No one knows yet what the hot summer months will hold. Cindy and Monty Burch are waiting to find out, along with hundreds of dog owners across Grand Rapids. Perhaps this year, if enough skunks infiltrate the city limits, officials will be forced to intercede.

I stand on my deck and focus on the shed at the bottom of the yard, surrounded now by a thick bank of hostas. It floats strangely in the darkness. In an odd way, I have begun to hope for a glimpse鈥攁 black body with a white tilde鈥攎oving quickly through the shadows. I never use my shed anyway. The skunks can have it. Fern fronds bounce on the breeze in the half-light.

I smell nothing.

But I know the skunks are down there somewhere, waiting.

The post On the (Very Smelly) Trail of the Skunk Takeover appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.