Orange Skunk camping at our door…?
Hi, me and my family live at a small farm in northern new york and at about 2:30 pm i started walking down our drive-way to check our mailbox and i saw this “skunk” sitting at the end of our drive-way it had a black head, very hairy orange back, black tail, white underbelly and a white strip running from its head to its tail… i thought it was dead so i took a stick that was laying on the ground and gave it a tap on the back to make sure and then it hunched up at me and started “Grr” ing at me so i ran back up to the house and waited for it to leave… i sat near the window for about 5 minutes and it started walking towards the house. in about 4 mintues it was sitting at our door step and then… fell asleep… it left 15 mintues later… does anyone know what type of skunk this is? and do you think it had rabies? odd… oh also the entire time this was happening my entire family was downstairs watching “war of the worlds”.
Hmm… i’ll try to catch a picture of it… it might have been a stray cat or something. maybe i’ve been watching to much war of the worlds? oh well…
That almost sounds more like a badger than a skunk to me, but I can’t be sure from the description. Was the tail large and bushy? Skunks have big bushy tails and generally do not have a white underbelly.
Here is a list of mammals in New York:
http://www.mammalsociety.org/statelists/newyork.html
Might it have been an ermine? See pic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Suffolk-stoats.jpg
Maybe it’s a fox squirrel??
Hey you are lucky he didn`t spray you.
He probably wanted to watch ”war of the worlds” with the family.
Skunks do not have any orange fur. Both the Striped Skunk and the Eastern Spotted Skunk (the only skunks you would see in NY) are black and white, not orange. The American Badger does not have a stripe that runs from its head to its tail, the stripe stops at its nape.
I know of no other wild animals in your area that match your description. I would suggest that you did not see it properly. Perhaps the lighting in your driveway (either cloud cover, or shadows with the light coming through tree limbs) caused you to be mistaken?
It sounds like it was nothing more than a domestic cat that was annoyed at having its nap disturbed. I used to have many, many cats, and they can growl very fiercely when disturbed.
This doesn’t sound like any wild animal you would expect to meet in NY state. It definitely is not a skunk as they are only black and white – unless it was covered with reddish mud.
Badgers have a white stripe on their heads, their bellies are sometimes reddish, but their backs are gray. They can be quite large and aggressive. You don’t say what size your animal is, but I assume it is skunk sized.