This past June, a woman walking through Brushy Creek in Piedmont, South Carolina, paused when she noticed a cage poking out from the riverbed.
The worried hiker enlisted the help of two boys nearby. Together, they hooked a strap to the cage and pulled
it up from the mud. They looked inside and found the animal they’d saved — a terrified skunk, barely hanging on.
“[She] was thin and lethargic,” a representative from Wild At Heart Wildlife Rehabilitation told The Dodo. “It was assumed that someone had trapped [her] at their home and disposed of [her] in the creek.”
In need of expert help, the woman called Wild At Heart founders Linda Long Hoskinson and Mike Hoskinson. Rescuers soon arrived and took the skunk to a safe place, where they examined her and provided her with the food and fluids she needed to recover.
A few days later, the rescuers received news about a group of baby skunks found living alone underneath a shed. The caller said they used to see the skunks with their mom in the evenings, but they hadn’t seen the mother skunk in days.
Rescuers set humane traps and managed to capture a few of the babies. They took them back to the rescue center and carefully introduced them to the older skunk. Their suspicions were correct — the skunks were a family.
“It was amazing to watch as both mom and the babies instantly knew each other,” the representative said. “Mom immediately accepted the babies and cuddled them and hid them underneath herself.”
The next morning, rescuers returned for the remaining baby skunks. Today, all of the skunks are safe in rehab, where they’ll stay until they’re ready to return home to the wild.
“Everyone is happy now,” the representative said. “As we do with all our young wildlife, they will live in a stall in our wildlife barn until the fall, when they will be released together on a large piece of property we use so they can live out their lives undisturbed.”
