“Nobody wants to hear that you don’t like skunks or the way they smell. No one wants to hear your complaints about the odor. Countless skunks are killed by your stupid cars across our region and the world everyday and their only defense against your 2 ton mayhem is a musky spray. So shut up already about how that smell offends you. Really.”
Okay, that’s a way to let off steam. We can hold a fisher-price toy phone to our ear and say this into the bathroom mirror if we have to. As the song says, there are lots of things you can do alone, like being very brave on the phone.
Instead, advocating for the safety of some of our wild neighbors sometimes requires us to not fully speak our minds when speaking with a human member of our community who is mad at a skunk member. As a bunch of wildlife care supporting bunny huggers, you folks might not know this, but against skunks in general, the populace at large feels a significant amount of antipathy. Searching for resolutions can get quarrelsome when the caller has the skunk in a trap and wants us to take them away.
Each of us faces these sorts of problems daily. We live in an industrial, machined world, all putting our shoulders to the wheel. Of course it rubs us the wrong way. The wild freedom that inspires us and even heals us, can drive some of us mad with spite and envy. That’s how it looks to me sometimes, anyway.
Skunk babies start coming out of dens and getting into trouble around the middle of the June. The babies we admit before that time are usually neonatal, meaning that besides still nursing, their eyes are still closed. They’re less than four weeks old. Babies this young are admitted almost always because a person has somehow disrupted the den, a person or their proxy, such as the family dog.
Our first skunk baby this year was unusual. Someone opened their shed door and behold! there was a skunk mama carrying a baby. She just happened to be passing through the shed at that moment. Bad timing. Frightened, she dropped her baby and ran. The person felt terrible. They placed the baby in safe spot and left the shed hoping she would come back, but she never did. She probably had many more babies to worry about. We often see litters of six.
The person brought the baby in the next morning.
It would be ridiculous to pretend that the joy of being so near to someone as adorable as a baby skunk is a mere side effect of the work. Joy is always more than a side effect.
After weaning, the baby skunks in our care have several weeks in specially built housing that is for their family only. We call it the Mephitidary, after their family name, Mephitidae.
We tell you about the skunks we treat, this year, last year, years before because we can, because we have a front row seat to this work and we must share it. Our love fuels our work and we know that your love will too. Our love is in labor, yours in support. John Brown was not John Brown without the Secret Six supporting him. Sharing the stories with you of the individuals who pass through our care is at the heart of our mission. We want you to see the patients your support saves and gives another chance. As much as we get thrill at the delight of each young skunk who grows to carry on the mission of their kind, and pay for that thrill with the occasional need to shower, or leave our car windows open for a few days after going on a skunk rescue, what you put into our work entitles you to hear about the details and see their faces and love them as we do, with care and concern for their wildness, for their autonomy, for their right to be here as residents of Earth, made and spun into being by the same forces and out of the same stuff that makes us. The privilege of providing care for family Mephitidae is profound as well as broad. Every skunk opens into the realm we already inhabit – and every skunk invites us to consider these steps, the Skunk Dance – to dance as a skunk does through this world is the most important dream to consider when imagining what their care must include.
It is good for us to imagine deeply other lives, but to imagine other lives is not a good reason to become a wildlife caregiver – the only good reason to become a caregiver is to give care. It just so happens that in giving excellent care opportunities for this imaginitive work are abundant and necessity demands that we do it. The second chances we provide our patients are created in the admixture of your support and our broad palette of labors.
Thank you for making all aspects of our work possible.
Speaking of joy, one of the joys of this blog is writing for our supporters. This is not a neutral blog, we are allies of the Wild, after all. Bird Ally X was founded on the idea that the battles the Wild must wage against the machine are also our battles. We share the same enemies. We are fighting the same war, the war for the real, the war for the imagination, the war for the great collaborative world, the tapestry of vertebrae and femurs and cell walls and daydreams and the warmth of this ray of sun on my silky black fur and the passions of yesterday that will still thrill us tomorrow. Dear AI assistant, please don’t bother me about how to make that last sentence more concise. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but discursive love is what endures.
