8 ways to get rid of your skunk problem
Is there a pesky skunk making your life miserable? No, I’m not talking about the folks in Washington. I mean an actual black and white skunk that keeps wandering onto your property in search of food, and occasionally stinking up the place.
There are ways to get rid of these annoying animals, but it’s not always easy. They’re nocturnal, so you probably won’t see them during the day. First, let’s take a look at why they’re on your property.
If there’s a skunk hanging around your home, that means it has found a food source. Otherwise it would be hanging around someone else’s home. Among their favorite meals are fruit, vegetables, bird seed and small mammals, as well as garbage, grubs and insects.
If they can find those items on your property on a regular basis, they may set up camp there. That could be under a garden shed, porch or deck, in a pile of rocks or wood, or in a ditch.
Among the ways to cut off their food supply and send them elsewhere are:
- Treat your lawn with a grub control product.
- Put a fence around your vegetable garden, burying the bottom part about a foot underground to keep them from digging under it.
- Make sure your garbage can lids are on tightly.
- Regularly rake up the area under your fruit trees.
- Catch them in a live trap, using peanut butter or bacon as bait. It must be a small trap to keep them from moving into a spraying position. There may be a legal issue regarding where you can release a skunk, so check into that.
- Use pepper spray on your trees and place ammonia-soaked rags in any area you think they might be using as a den.
- If you discover their hiding place, use bright lights, noise or a sprinkler to scare them away.
- If you see that a skunk has left its hiding place, try to seal off that area so it won’t return.
What tricks have you used to keep skunks away from your property. Readers would love to hear about them.
Instead of burying the bottom of the fence around your garden you can use old iron pipes or rebar and tie it around the bottom of the wire, works well for coons too,
We had skunks living under our backyard shed. We directed a floodlights into the enter-exit. Turned it on every night. In a few days they were gone and never came back.
Well Frank, I’m not so worried about the four-legged skunks, you can smell them a mile away. It’s the ones that walk on two legs that I’m concerned about; they can sneak up on you and you will never know until it is too late – you’ve been sprayed.
Aren’t the moth balls ruining your lawn?
We use moth balls to keep a ground hog away. I would think that they would work for the skunks as well.
Dear Frank,
Living in rural Colorado we have lots of skunks, everywhere in our neck of the woods They often prowl the streets and alley in towns. The whole community can tell when they tangle with a neighborhood dog, for a days!!!!
On the ranch we used to scatter mothballs around hay stacks, crawl spaces under barns, our houses etc. That kept most animals from nesting in the nooks and crannies.
In the wild if you do as instructed in our book Survival 101 – How To Bug Out and Survive the First 72 Hours, carry a can of red pepper powder or cayenne pepper. Judiciously sprinkling it around your camp site helps turn away all sorts of varmints from mice to bears, including “Pepe La Peu”!
Don’t forget, if you are desperate. make a clean head shot killing a skunk instantly, careful cleaning it and eat it! Since they are omnivores, they taste a lot like raccoon and opossum.
Oh! And there is an false urban legend out there that baby skunks cannot spray. My son tried to catch one for a pet once and found that out the hard way that information was bull.
God Bless,
Orrin
You can also put mothballs in their hiding place too. This usually runs them off. Remember that if the moth balls disintegrate then they may come back unless you have sealed off the hiding place.
Use Moth Balls to keep skunks at bay. I throw a few handfuls of moth balls under the house or around your Properity. The skunks WILL LEAVE.