Skunk wars

Sunday morning I woke up really early (like 4:30am) to the very strong smell of Skunk.  That is never pleasant, but living in the country comes with such inconveniences.  In my half awake state I figured one of our cats had provoked a skunk and gotten sprayed, I even thought I heard something beneath our bedroom.    Since not much will convince me to get out of bed unless absolutely necessary I went back to sleep. 

 When I woke up for good I could still smell the awful stench so I decided to investigate.  I noticed the smell was the strongest in our room, the hallway and Allyson's bedroom.  I then went outside to see what I could find (not sure what I thought I was going to find).  Nothing seemed amiss outside and the cats I saw were fine, they had avoided the skunk.  As I came back into the house I came to the awful realization that it didn't stink outside, just inside our house!  Not good.  I remembered the weird noises I had heard I realized the skunk must have sprayed in the crawl space under our house.  Thankfully it was a nice day because I had all the doors and windows open all day and the smell mostly went away, it did linger the longest in Allyson's room.

Skunk: 1 Us: 0 

We didn't want skunks under our house but we didn't want to close off the crawl space and trap a skunk (or skunks) under there.  So we enlisted the help of the local federal trapper.  Not that you need a trapper but we needed a skunk trap (really just a cat trap) and we didn't want to pay for one.  We set the trap last night (with peanut butter and crackers per the trappers advice) and wondered if we would get the skunk.

This morning before I left for jury duty (I got off by the way) I checked the trap. We had a skunk! Success! We called the trapper and he came by to "take care" of the skunk.  Also we learned you should not put the trap under the house, the skunk can still spray while in the trap (thankfully this one did not).

We also learned that this is skunk mating season, the skunk we caught was a male searching for females.  Most likely we have a female living under the house and the male was looking for her (we are setting the trap again in search of her).  Apparently the spray is most often a result of males fighting over a female. And now you know more than you ever wanted to know about skunks.

Skunk: 1 Us: 1

The war continues.