After eight months of running the Border Wildlife Study, we’ve finally detected all four Sky Island skunks on our remote cameras! These four skunks are: the western spotted skunk, the hog-nosed skunk, the hooded skunk, and the striped skunk.
Here are some trends we noticed in our skunk spottings:
- Hooded skunks appear most often across all our Border Wildlife Study camera blocks.
- Hog-nosed skunks are the second most common skunk detected by our cameras.
- We’ve seen western spotted skunks in both the Huachuca Mountains and Patagonia Mountains.
- We rarely see striped skunks—which is surprising given they range across North America.
- Most of the skunk diversity we see tends to be in our mountain camera blocks.
Pssst! Go check out our two creature features on the western spotted skunk and the hooded skunk for more cool facts about these incredible Sky Island species.
Skunk species detected on the Border Wildlife Cameras. Skunks are nocturnal thus photos of them are not always perfect. Top left to bottom right: hooded, striped, hog-nosed, western spotted.
Sky Island Skunk Bingo:
In October 2020, Sky Island Alliance launched FotoFauna, a new wildlife monitoring network for citizen scientists. Through this project, people from across the region can use their backyard wildlife cameras to help us track the movement and migration of nearly three dozen Sky Island species year round.
Our Sky Island skunks—the western spotted skunk, striped skunk, hooded skunk, and hog-nosed skunk—are part of this ongoing FotoFauna project. We invite you to join FotoFauna and submit monthly surveys to us about the species you detect on camera, which will help us better understand how wildlife are adapting to things like urban development and seasonal changes.
We also invite you to try out our FotoFauna bingo card! Can you get your own skunk bingo?
Try your hand at our FotoFauna bingo card! Can you get a Sky Island skunk bingo?
If you get a BINGO, share your card and tag us on Facebook or Instagram. We’d love to see it!