way too close!!!!

[Scrapfe]

I think he was eating them!!! dam skunk!Im heading back out with a 22 wish me luck

Skunks are terrible dancers. They just don't watch where they step. You live in New York, check out the Victor company in Oneida, New York. Skunks are nocturnal. If you saw one around your hives in AM daylight, he was probably only the end of the chow line.

http://www.rpoutdoors.com/viccoilsprin.html

PS Skunks can carrry rabies without displaying any symptoms. DO NOT contact skunk body fluids.

[Tom G. Laury]

Hey I forgot about him!

[geoffkb]

I used to sleep out on our deck sometimes and skunks would come and eat out of the dry catfood container. I was woken up a couple of times by the noise of crunching, looked over the edge and there's a skunk within arms reach, very beautiful!

They also got into the garage through a catdoor, my wife was using a shop vac once and caught hold of one underneath a low shelf. She thought it was a rag or something till she pulled it out.

Another time she was in the kitchen and heard a scratching, opened the door to the garage and there was a skunk looking for the catfood again! The amazing thing was it that neither time they sprayed!

[J-Bees]

I will leave that to you to try first,and let me know how it goes.by the way what do you do with it once you have it off the ground???

you run them down grab the tail an stick them into a bag. They can not spray unless front feet are on something firm. hides sell real good:}:}

JB:}

[Michael Palmer]

But they also love eggs. I knew of some "old timers" that would give the skunks a free meal of raw eggs and arsenic. That got my attention!

I used to use eggs and zinc phosphide. Killer on skunks...and anything else that would eat eggs. So, I stopped using it.

Does asprin and eggs really do the same? What else does it kill?

[Dave Burrup]

If you want something to eat mice and unfortunately birds nothing is better than a skunk. They also like bees. They can devistate a hive in short order. They will tap or scratch on the front of the hive and eat the bees as they come out to fight.

Some Myths that I haved tested:

If you shoot them in the head they will not spay: This only works if you destroy the brain or sever the spine. When you shoot make sure the tail is down or at least the tip is curled over. If the tip is up straight the jets are out and the guns are loaded. A skunk has two jets that are inside the anus until the tip of the tail goes up. When they are killed with the jets inside the musk will be shed inside the rectum, no smell.

If you grab them by the tail they cannot spray: Well I have tried this too. When I was changing pipe we had one running along side the road as we went out on the tractor. The skunk was running so hard that its tail was not up fully as we went past I grabbed the skunk. Well it is true he did not spray. The jets were inside, but I had one very mad nasty skunk by the tail. It did everything it could to get hold of me with those teeth they are so well equiped with. We gave the tractor all the gas and I flung that skunk as far as I could and it hit the ground in a tumbling run and did not even spray.

For those of you in town or around your house: Use a small live trap. A skunk will crawl into about anything for food. If the trap is small enough that he can not raise his tail he cannot spray. You can move the trap wherever necessary to dispatch the skunk. Drowning works very well for those of you that cannot shoot.

What I prefer is a bucket set with a conabar trap (google it) again the result is a dead skunk without any bad smell. If you or your neighbors have cats this is not a good idea.

[BEES4U]

Aspirin is deadly to cats.
Ernie

[brooksbeefarm]

Being a retired fire capt.I now know the differance between a fog nozzle and a straight stream.When a skunk has his feet on the ground he can through a fog stream,With his feet off the ground he can through a nice straight strream,not that I would know first hand but i!ve heard this.

[power napper]

I can personally attest to a skunks ability to be able to shoot a straight stream of green from its posterior end in February of 1972.
I had a trap line which I ran daily on a enduro motorcycle, the temperature was downright nasty being around zero F in daylight hours.
I had a dirt hole set for foxes and the skunk had found the set and got a back foot/leg into the trap, the skunk was curled in a ball when I was runnng the trap line so I got off the cycle and walked to the site, this is on a gas pipe line rite of way. Skunk was alive, I thought well a club will do the job----yeah--it did a job alright, I was heaving and gagging and amazed at how pretty the dark green spray showed up on the fresh white snow covering the ground, until the odor overtook me!!!
I had a coil of .045 stainless steel wire for tieing traps to trees etc, so I figured that if I were to put a noose around the neck of the skunk and pull it would choke the skunk to death quickly.
Using a long spindly pole to hold the "lasso" end the task was accomplished and I pulled the wire as the skunk sprayed more====a lot more gagging occured during this maneuver.
Now that the wire was on and the trap held the rear leg it was time for the final maneuver.
I pulled the wire taut and secured to a tree--the skunk was suspended in air.
I ran the rest of the trap line and returned to the skunk site--it did not seem to stink as bad now.

The wire was tight, the skunk was limp sort of--just to be safe, I pushed down hard on the taut wire and to my surprise the "dead skunk" was not dead, I never before had seen a skunk hanging from a wire curl its' body and twist while spraying getting a 360 degree coverage, the solid green spray--wow --the overspray got me bad this time, I was upchucking---now it was war.
A heavy duty club was requisitioned post haste--and the swinging commenced.
After this encounter was completed the wire I had used was attatched to the rear of the motorcycle and I drug the skunk home.
Now we had a barn where I kept the motorcycle so I parked it and it was getting dark, maybe my clothes stunk--so i took off the outer layer of insulated coveralls and hung on a spike, smelled my jacket figured I had better remove that layer also--then took off boots.
Maybe my lover girl would not smell the skunk on me if I showered fast.
I opened the door to our mobile home and before I could get the first leg into the door she was yelling "out--out--out--you are not coming in here smelling like that!!!!!
After pleading and shivering she ordered me to strip outside befoe entering----Man was it cold, I still remember.

[papa bear]

i am leery of putting out poisons. you never know what will get into them. well maybe the on about the aspirin if it only effects cats too .

most beeks around here use tack strips, like the kind that holds down carpet. nail them to a board and put them in front of your hive. also, you can put tacks through a shingle and lay them in front of your hives

[bnatural]

I use a mesh electric fence with a solar charger around my hives, which keeps out bears and skunks. But, they do hang around the chickens. Even though I use multiple strands of hot wire with chicken wire behind, at least one (and also some raccoons) has found a way in and killed a few birds. Over the past four years I have live trapped four skunks. I prefer to take them a few miles to a state part across the river and release them. Two behaved well - very calm with no hint of aggression or spraying. One I found on its back in the trap asleep and snoring. It was so calm I was able to stroke its paw through the cage. The third one was so nervous it sprayed while in the trap and again in the back of my pickup (with cap). It took a couple of weeks for the smell to abate. One I caught after it had killed several chickens, so I took it out back to the cornfield, released it and dispatched it with a .22. It released enough fluid to stink up the area for about a month. It could be smelled at the house well over 100 yards away. I have to say that they are beautiful animals.

Bill

#################

I shoot, therefore I smell

[KQ6AR]

I've heard some people put tack strips in front of the hives to keep the skunks out.

A friend of mine got one in one of his traps one winter. He stripped down in the woods and ran home naked.

[Hobie]

Reminded me of the time I went out to feed the outdoor cat after sunset. Dark, but still light enough not to need a flashlight. I saw that the neighbors had been letting trash blow around again, and went to pick up a white plastic bag stuck in the bushes. As I reached for it, I saw that this was no plastic bag, but the very wide white stripe of a skunk! I beat a hasty retreat and managed to escape.

[BEES4U]

Just curious, is the skunk population census up or down at your address.
Ernie

[blaine]

down by one as of last week.

[Scott J.]

Shooting skunks. Stand up wind for obvious reasons. Wait till the tail is down, aim for the chest not the head. (If the skunk is rabid the virus is in the brain tissue.)
When shooting the skunk in the chest, only shoot it once. 90 percent of the time it will not know what just happened and will not spray. Nothing is fool proof with a skunk. Just my experience having shot several hundred of them over the years.

The egg and aspirin solution I would be very wary of having a dog get into it. My dogs love eggs.

Box traps. I throw a towel over the trap before picking it up.

[Troy]

A couple aspirin won't hurt a dog though. We have been giving an aspirin to our dog every time she is hurting for over a year now.

Dogs have a problem with Ibuprofen though.. DON'T GIVE DOGS ADVIL.

I suppose 4 or more aspirin might not be helpful, but even so it should not do any permanent harm to a dog.

[ScadsOBees]

I was face to face with a SKUNK!!!!!

Whooeee! You got lucky! If I've got to be that close to a skunk, face to face is the way I want it to be!

That stuff must be plastic soluble...it will make EVERYTHING in your pantry taste like that, unopened food or not opened! Nothing quite as tasty as skunk twinkies....(not the kind you find in front of the hive)