Skunks might be regarded as lowly creatures — a nuisance at best — but a wildlife enthusiast was impressed when she caught video of a skunk stashing chunks of a roadkill wild turkey carcass in a mountain lion’s lair.
“I was wondering, does the mountain lion come back and get it (the turkey) or would another animal come get it?,” avid wildlife watcher Janet Pesaturo of northwest Montana told Cowboy State Daily.
Or would the mountain lion come back and have the turkey for dinner and the skunk for dessert?
As it turned out, the skunk got most of the turkey carcass, and a few other critters grabbed small bits of it.
By the time the mountain lion came back, it wasn’t impressed with what was left over and the skunk got to live another day.
“The mountain lion showed up a day or two later, and by then the scraps were too small for it to be interested,” Pesaturo said.
All the action was caught on one of the trail cameras that she and her husband, Robert Zak, have set up near their home in Columbia Falls, Montana.
A Passion For Watching Wildlife
Pesaturo has been tracking animals for years and has gotten good at tracing the passage of various animals.
But she and Zak always wondered what parts of wild animals’ lives they were missing by tracking them and catching whatever glimpses they could.
So a few years back they set out video trail cameras, starting in their home state of Massachusetts.
Trail cameras “became an obsession for me because I got into wildlife tracking about 20 years ago,” Pesaturo said. “But seeing is believing, and I just wanted to see what was really happening out there.”
In Massachusetts, the wildlife lives in small patches of natural cover amid sprawling suburbs, she said.
“Fishers (a weasel-like species) are suburban animals in Massachusetts, she said.
Fishers and their cousins, pine martens, are rare in states like Wyoming and Montana.
When the couple moved to Montana, Pesaturo said she was excited to get video of big, spectacular animals such as grizzlies, wolves and mountain lions.
She wasn’t expecting a skunk to put on one of the best shows.
Tenacious Little Critter
Zak has a background in engineering, so he handles the technical side of setting up cameras, while Pesaturo uses her wildlife tracking skills to find the best places to set them up.
Operating under the moniker Winterberry Wildlife Cams, they’ve built a social media fanbase, with videos offering a peek into wild animals’ lives.
In one spot, Pesaturo discovered a mountain lion was using a hollow log for shelter and figured that would be a great place to set up a camera.
Last month, they set out a roadkill turkey carcass, and waited to see which creature would take the tempting treat. Expecting it would be the mountain lion, or something else big and fierce.
It turned out that the skunk – small, but still fierce – was first to claim the prize.
Pesaturo wasn’t surprised to see a skunk going for rancid meat; skunks will eat just about anything.
What surprised her was watching the skunk breaking the carcass down into manageable chunks and dragging them into the hollow log.
“I didn’t realize that skunks would cache their food like that,” she said. “It was the first time I ever got video of a skunk doing that.”
Over the next couple of days and nights, the skunk ate its fill. A fox and bobcat also showed up to gobble some down.
Then some ravens showed up to pick at the bones until, finally the mountain lion showed up, only to find that the party was over.
Sometimes Critters Take Turns
As spring continues, roadkill and winterkill carcasses provide feasts for the skunk fox, bobcat and other animals, Pesaturo said.
She recalled that a deer carcass was once the main attraction. There’s competition for such a delicacy among carnivorous animals, but they rarely resort to fighting over it.
She got some dramatic trail cam photos of a skunk and a fox eyeballing each other over the deer carcass.
The skunk was standing “with its raised tail and arched back” as if trying to warn the fox that it was about to get a blast of stink.
“Surprisingly, the series of photos showed that it was the skunk who backed down this time,” she said.
Eventually, the skunk and fox worked things out, Pesaturo said.
“However, the two animals ‘took turns’ feeding for several nights,” she said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
