Close Encounters of the Smelly Kind : Get Out the Tomato Juice; It’s Skunk Season

Soon after Greg Long moved into his pleasant North Park home not far from woodsy Balboa Park, he knew he was in for trouble--skunk trouble. But it took the 35-year-old hairdresser two months before he really found out what trouble was.

First, one of the small but aggressive animals chased Long’s Lhasa apso puppy. Later, the skunk chased Long himself, as he held his craven dog. Fearing that the skunk would take up permanent residence beneath his Montclair Street home, Long boarded up the crawl space entrance at the side of the house.

“Well, I ended up boarding up the skunk under my house, so it got mad at me and sprayed the house all underneath,” Long said. “It was awful, just like it was in the house, living with me.”

Long called the Humane Society, but it didn’t help. He then called an exterminator, which came out and trapped the skunk for $50. Relieved, Long proceeded to board up the crawl space again, only to realize--the hard way--that he had trapped a second skunk.

“I was deadly afraid of skunks at that point, but I didn’t want to pay another $50, so I set a trap,” Long said. First, he laid strips of lunch meat in a Hansel-and-Gretel-like trail from the crawl space into the front yard, placing an extra-large pile on the front lawn.

Then he placed a bright light into the crawl space, which scared the skunk out from under the house. Seeing the lunch meat, the animal followed the trail into the front yard. Long had time to board the crawl space up, and, again, he thought his troubles were over.

They weren’t. In fact, it took nearly two years for Long to rid himself of the beasts, and by that time he had tired of home ownership and skunks and moved into a cottage in another neighborhood.

“This one doesn’t have any skunks,” Long said triumphantly. “I made sure before I moved in.”

As Long will attest, skunks come out of the canyons at night, leaving panic in their pungent wake. Nearly every San Diego County resident of more than a few months has a story to tell of a confrontation with these small but potent animals.

San Diegans--and their northern neighbors from Orange County to Tehama County--are having more close encounters with skunks than ever before. Wildlife experts contend that there are not more skunks in California; there are just more humans moving into what was once solely skunk domain.

In addition, this has been the musty month of May, the beginning of what is known in animal control and tomato juice sales circles as the unofficial opening of skunk season, which usually stretches until about September and is marked by increased sightings of--and sprayings by--these sleek little black-and-whites. The baby animals emerge in May, and the warm weather keeps the skunks active until September, animal experts say.

According to James Dolan, the San Diego Zoo’s general curator of mammals, skunks are nocturnal and are very compatible with human habitation. There are six species of skunk, but the most common in California is Mephitis mephitis --the sleek black animal with two characteristic white stripes down its back.

Skunks, which are a member of the weasel family, usually live about 10 years and reach a weight 6 to 10 pounds. “They’re about the size of a domestic cat with the legs cut off,” Dolan said.

Their pungent odor comes from fluid stored in two anal sacks under the tail. The fluid is partly oil, and “it burns your brains out,” Dolan said. “The smell is horrible. It can blind you temporarily, because it is so abrasive.”

The animals eat harmful rodents and insects, bird eggs and--as many pet owners have found out the hard way--they love cat and dog food, Dolan said.

When disturbed, most species of skunk exhibit characteristic warning behavior, such as stamping their feet and doing handstands. If the threat continues, the animals will turn their hindquarters toward the target and eject a fine spray of stinking yellow fluid as far as 10 feet.

Despite their scent, these gentle, intelligent animals are readily tamed. Their hides are used for furs, their flesh for meat and their spray as a base for perfumes.

Indigenous to North and South America, skunks have been around for about 12 million years and have been tangling with humans since that species surfaced about 8 million years later.

Skunks have a field day in San Diego County, with its 1.6 million acres of open space and its countless canyons where the creatures are most comfortable living.

Although they are found throughout the county, North County sightings have become much more common as cities such as Carlsbad, Oceanside and Vista develop and expand into open space that used to house only skunks and other wildlife.

And last summer, skunks made quite a stink in fashionable Del Mar, nesting in garages and under houses, sending their fumes up air vents into bedrooms, tearing up lawns, dipping into cat and dog dishes and robbing vegetable gardens. Grading and construction of North City West, the housing development on Del Mar’s inland edge was blamed.

Lance Read, spokesman for the San Diego County Department of Animal Control, said he receives an estimated half-dozen skunk calls every day during skunk season.

But La Jolla resident Uschi Rohrl would never call the authorities on her tiny friends. Rohrl’s La Jolla Farms Road home was built about 20 years ago in an area unofficially called “Skunk Canyon” by its residents.

“I started with the skunks about 14 years ago,” Rohrl said. “They’re just cute. I love them. Before I had pets, I tamed skunks, foxes and raccoons. They all slept in my yard.”

At her peak, Rohrl said, she had an estimated 30 skunks gamboling through her one-acre backyard. But that was before the 1983 death of her skunk-loving dog, who used to raise baby skunks and whose favorite pastime was carting around the Rohrl’s lawn mower, complete with a lawn mower bag full of skunks who found it a comfortable place to curl up.

“They still come every night, but they’re not tame anymore,” she said. Her new dog does not share Rohrl’s affinity for the furry creatures, biting them when they spray, and Rohrl now has to move the skunks’ food bowls out onto the driveway.

“They used to come between 3:30 and 4 p.m. and spend the evening,” she said. “Now they usually come between 5 and 6 p.m., eat and go back to the bushes. But the skunk traffic comes in all night. There are usually between two and six out there all the time.”

Jean Agsten, who lives in the North Park area, doesn’t have as many skunk friends as Rohrl, but hers have the run of her house, via a doggie door and a trap door into her bedroom that Agsten keeps open for her five cats.

Agsten usually sees about one a night and keeps special bowls for their food and water on her patio. “Sometimes I can hear them chomping, and last night I smelled one,” she said.

Although the animals are friendly and coexist relatively well with her cats, Agsten said, they don’t do as well with her neighbors.

“One night at about 9 p.m., I was standing on the front steps getting my cats inside, when a man walked down the street with a little dog on a leash,” Agsten said. “The next thing I knew, he had jumped right into the middle of the street with his dog in his arms. A skunk came barreling down the sidewalk . . . heading for my gate.”

As the creature raced into her yard, the man turned to her, tossed his head, clutched his pup to his chest and said: “ ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever gotten chased off of a city sidewalk by a skunk,’ ” Agsten said. “The skunk decided he had the right-of-way, and I haven’t seen the man since. . . . I don’t know of anyone else around here who likes skunks as much as I do.”

The only skunk statistics kept are the numbers of confirmed rabid skunks, according to the state Department of Health Statistics, because skunks are the No. 1 carrier of rabies.

The number of rabid skunks found in California annually has increased in the last decade, with 170 confirmed cases of rabies found in skunks in 1975 and 323 found in 1984.

Although the numbers of reported rabid skunks have increased, the threat of rabies has not. No rabid skunks were found in San Diego, Orange or Los Angeles counties in 1984, said Dr. Ed Bayer, the Berkeley-based public health veterinarian for the state Department of Health Services. “A lot of these skunks are found in backwoods counties,” he said. “You go out in the boonies and who would even know if a skunk died with rabies out there. As man gets closer to them, he sees more of them.”

Because of the threat of rabies, the state has enacted a “buy a skunk, pay a fine” law, and the purchase, sale or barter of skunks, or the keeping of skunks as pets is outlawed, Bayer said.

Although most California county agencies suggest similar methods of skunk-proofing homes--barricading crawl spaces and washing animals in tomato juice to neutralize the stench--official treatment of skunks varies from county to county. In San Diego, residents with skunk problems are pretty much on their own. The county Department of Animal Control and the state Department of Fish and Game suggest calling in private exterminators, who will trap the animals for a fee of $50 per animal.

The San Diego Humane Society rents skunk traps for $10 and suggests that residents relocate the animals--which are not hurt by the box traps--to wilder areas, said Lt. Jim Baker, Humane Society investigations supervisor. Sometimes, Baker said, the society will relocate the skunks themselves.

In Los Angeles County, animal control spokesman Richards said the department will trap and relocate skunks for residents with skunk problems.

And in Orange County, animal control officials suggest that residents rent skunk traps from feed and grain stores. People with trapped skunks can then call the animal control department, and an agent will “euthanize” the beast on the spot, said Oliver, the department spokesman.

“We don’t relocate them here, because there are too many of them already,” Oliver said. “We’re not going to put a live skunk in a truck full of dogs . . . And besides, they can’t afford to live in Orange County anyway.”

Regardless of whether they are suitable inhabitants of San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties, skunks do have some beneficial qualities:

- One Canadian inventor sold capsules of eau de skunk for women to pin on their nightgowns and bra straps to use as anti-rape devices. One broken capsule full of skunk funk would repel any rapist, the inventor argued. Although it wouldn’t do much for the women, “It’s better than the alternative of being raped,” he said.

- A Wisconsin inventor bottled skunk oil for hunters to smear over their bodies to get rid of their human smell and enhance their chances of success in the field. Calling his creation “Super Skunk,” the inventor said, “I always bottle it outside on a real windy day. When I’m done for the day, I take a long shower and leave my clothes outside, but even that doesn’t always remove the smell. After I bottle, I don’t plan on going anywhere for the next few days.”

But skunks are cursed with one tragic flaw--hubris, the exaggerated self-confidence of a Lear or a Macbeth--which often leads them to grievous and early deaths.

Protected by a force field of stench, the skunk believes he is immortal and therefore is not intimidated by the occasional 18-wheeler--hauling tons of equipment or cases of beer--that tends to barrel down country roads at speeds designed to ruffle the hair of the bravest Mephitis mephitis .

So when the skunk saunters out in the middle of a road and sees such a vehicle, its first reaction, said San Diego Zoo curator Dolan, is to thump its front feet in its age-old dance of warning. When the truck is not frightened into submission, the brave little animal turns, raises its tail, ejects a 10-foot spray of stinking skunk oil . . . and is promptly smashed flat.

As Loudon Wainwright III sang in his 1970s Top 20 single, all that is left is a “dead skunk in the middle of the road, stinkin’ to high heaven.”