By the Chilltown Blues
This winter, on one of the most frigid nights so far, we’ve seen something walking around Chilltown at night. We thought it was a cat, at first — one of the ones we root for to make it through an extremely cold night or, in the summer, find a peaceful spot in an incredibly loud and hot night.
But even on an empty sidewalk, cats walk around a bit more tepidly than what we were witnessing: it was, in fact, a skunk.
If we didn’t know any better, we might have even said the skunk jauntily crossing a street looked as carefree and purposeful as someone jogging in similar temps.
Skunk sightings are not unheard of in the north Jersey/NYC-area. But nothing in a surface-level knowledge of skunks — one of a handful of animals considered swamp- or river-rats — suggests they’d manage to survive well in a crowded area during a cold winter.
Skunks prefer open spaces, so of all the places for them to be, a densely packed city is not ideal. New York City, for all its density, has much more open parkland for skunks to get a foothold than Chilltown.
So wanting to know how exactly they can fare here, in near-Arctic temperatures, we did our research and discovered how much they fit with what’s already happening.
