It is stressful to have skunks on your property. However, what is even more heartbreaking is finding a nest of baby skunks on your property without the mother in sight. Sometimes, the skunk living on your property may arrive when it is pregnant and move under your shed, porch, or in a den just to provide adequate shelter for its babies when they arrive.
Baby skunks are born blind and defenseless; this means that the mother has to provide for them until they are grown enough to hunt for food on their own. Between providing for itself and the young skunks, a mother skunk will have to be absent sometimes, therefore, seeing a nest of skunk babies out on their own without a mother is pretty common.
What should you do to the baby skunks?
Of course, the next step to take after discovering baby skunks is to have them removed from your property. This is because if you leave them, they will grow up and also start to cause nuisance to you and your household. However, before removing the babies you need to confirm that they are indeed alone without a mother. As mentioned above, skunks sometimes have to leave their babies to go search for food.
During the mother’s absence, you may stumble upon the nest. Baby skunks have also been known to slip out of their dens and wander off. One should therefore assume that baby skunks are alone without a mother around. If the mother skunk is around, it should first be reunited with its babies and then relocated together as the babies may not survive on their own if relocated alone.
It should be noted, however, that baby skunks are even more difficult to deal with than adult skunks because the babies have not fully mastered their defense systems and will spray at anyone who tries to come close without a warning typical of adult skunks. The spray from a baby skunk is just as stinky and potent as an adult’s spray as they develop this feature early in life. This makes removing baby skunks particularly difficult and messy.
To remove baby skunks, wildlife experts usually recommend wildlife exclusion. This method involves installing an exclusion trap at the entry points of the skunks. The door of the cage structure is open at one end and closed on the other end. Once the skunk enters the trap, it is unable to access its home again. Exclusion works perfectly for baby skunks. However, if the skunks are not old enough to walk around, the exclusion trap will not work on them as they cannot leave their den yet.
If the skunks cannot leave the den yet and there is no mother skunk around to fend for them, they may likely not survive and this will cause serious problems later on. To figure out if the baby skunks can leave yet, you only need to figure out when the skunks were born. Most baby skunks are born around early spring and they stay in the dens for about a month and a half before they can go outside. They then begin to follow the mother out on hunts, learning how to do it themselves for when they will be on their own.
Therefore, if you find a den of skunks early on in spring, there is a possibility that they cannot go out yet and so the exclusion traps would not work. When this happens, you may need to employ the services of a trained wildlife removal professional. They will be able to safely remove the skunks without any incidents.
Go back to the St. Clair County wildlife removal home page.