7/23/2008 Skunk Battle

Our neighborhood is plagued with skunks. When we moved into our house we noticed a presence that was almost negligible, but late at night there were noises that made me wonder if there was a hobo family colonizing my basement. As it turned out it was a hobo family.... A skunk family.
It sounded like an old woman in a housecoat tip-toeing around while eating peanut brittle, and an occasional fight that sounded like the hushed squealing of vampire children. Not to mention the occasional smell of burning plastic and tires. It was so bad that we would leave our house for an hour with the windows open and the fans going.

One afternoon our cable internet went out, so I called the company. They sent a service man to my house and he went under the house to investigate the cable issue. Our cable was installed along the front wall of the house which is built over a crawl-space but can be accessed through our basement. It is about two and three quarters feet high, and to get to the area where the cable enters the house requires an Indiana Jones style crawl.

When he came out looking horrified I knew something bad had happened. Before I could inquire, he walked straight to his truck, got in, yelled something out the window, and drove away. I think he yelled something about not getting payed enough.

I was tantalized and decided to suit up and investigate. I got the flashlight and headed downstairs armed with a rubbermaid tub. I shined the light in the corners, then towards the crawlspace. I could see a little rectangle of light coming from the front of the house's foundation, and then noticed a few large holes dug into the earth floor of the basement. I went outside and looked around for holes, finding one on the other side of the basement door where there is a shed roof attached to the house. I continued looking and discovered a network of ditches, mounds and holes almost 15 or 20 meters away from my house! I wondered if they led into my basement, and then wondered how many animals lived down there.

After this awful discovery we became the number 1 consumers of Quikrete brand concrete product, and also of the household cleaning product, "The Works". Our method included setting "works bombs" in the holes, then pouring concrete into them till the openings were filled up. As unorthodox as it was, our method seemed to get them out of the basement.

We tried all of the other recommendations before resorting to this. Black pepper was dumped by the pound into the holes, enough Irish Spring soap to last a lifetime of cleanliness, a product called "Skunk-B-Gone" which seemed like a mixture of pepper and other aromatic spices. . . . The list could go on; we tried lots of approaches without any success. Although I wasn't pleased with our decision to take such an aggressive approach, I was happy to finally employ my Works-Bomb skills for something productive.

Now that our house is skunk free we are seeing more and more roaming the neighborhood. They move around slow and stupid like zombies, and the feral cats occasionally fight them, resulting in a stink that blankets our block, just like a weather system. On two different occasions I almost trapped skunks in five gallon buckets and tubs, but I chicken out at the last moment in fear of getting sprayed. Amazingly, you can provoke a skunk quite a bit without getting sprayed. If I had caught them I think I would have built them a mini-ark and let them set sail down the Tennessee river. Seeing that coming down the river would bring a smile to anyone's face.