Skunks eat mostly insects — grubs, beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, and larvae — along with earthworms, mice, voles, eggs, carrion, fruits, and berries, plus pet food and garbage where people supply them. They are opportunistic omnivores with a strong insect-heavy tilt: in spring and summer, the bulk of a striped skunk’s diet is invertebrates, which is why the surest sign of a skunk working your property is a scatter of shallow, cone-shaped holes in the lawn.
The striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis) is one of North America’s most widespread mammals, at home from Canadian prairie to Florida suburb, and its diet is a big part of why. A skunk needs no specialty food, no particular habitat, and no hunting speed — just soil with insects in it and a nose good enough to find them. Here’s the full menu, season by season, and what it means for your yard.
An Insect-Eating Machine First
Skunks are members of their own family (Mephitidae), but they forage much like small badgers: nose down, moving slowly, digging whatever smells promising. Insects and other invertebrates are the core of the warm-season diet — commonly the majority of what a skunk eats from spring through early fall. The list is long:
- White grubs — the soil-dwelling larvae of June beetles, Japanese beetles, and chafers, a favorite above almost everything else
- Adult beetles, grasshoppers, and crickets — abundant, easy to catch, and energy-rich
- Caterpillars, including many lawn and garden pests — cutworms and armyworms among them
- Earthworms, snails, and slugs — taken steadily on damp nights
- Bees, wasps, and yellowjackets — skunks famously dig out ground nests, scratching at hive entrances and eating the defenders; their thick fur and tolerance for stings make it a fair trade
That insect appetite makes skunks genuinely useful. A skunk patrolling your neighborhood eats an enormous number of lawn grubs, garden caterpillars, and stinging-insect nests over a season — free, quiet pest control that mostly happens while you sleep. Farmers recognized this long ago: early agricultural bulletins classed the striped skunk among the most beneficial mammals on the farm for its consumption of crop-damaging insects and mice, a reputation the animal has never quite gotten credit for in the suburbs.
Two caveats keep the picture honest. Skunks don’t distinguish pest insects from beneficial ones — ground-nesting native bees get dug up along with the yellowjackets — and the pest-control benefit comes bundled with the digging itself, which can leave a grub-heavy lawn looking pockmarked by October. Most homeowners find the trade worthwhile; a few Octobers convince others to deal with the grubs directly and let the skunk move along.
The Rest of the Menu
Small mammals, eggs, and reptiles
Skunks round out their protein with whatever small vertebrates they can catch or find: mice and voles (including nestfuls of young), shrews, the eggs and nestlings of ground-nesting birds, small snakes and lizards, and frogs. They are slow, so most vertebrate prey is either cornered in a burrow, found in a nest, or already dead — carrion, including roadkill, is a steady part of the diet year-round. Notably, striped skunks show a documented degree of resistance to rattlesnake venom, one of several North American carnivores that can tangle with pit vipers at lower risk than their size would suggest.
Plants: fruit, berries, nuts, and corn
From late summer into winter, plant foods take a bigger share. Skunks eat wild fruits — cherries, blackberries, grapes, ground-fallen apples and pears — plus corn, nuts, and seeds as insects grow scarce. They are not climbers, so everything comes from ground level: windfall fruit under a backyard tree is classic autumn skunk food, while the fruit still on the branch is safe.
The human-supplied buffet
Around houses, three items dominate skunk complaints: pet food left outdoors, garbage in loose-lidded cans, and spilled bird seed under feeders. Skunks also work compost piles and, in rural settings, occasionally take poultry eggs. It’s a shorter list than the raccoon’s — skunks can’t climb or open latches, so they take what sits at ground level — but it’s more than enough to put a skunk on a nightly route through your yard. (For comparison, see what raccoons eat — the two species overlap heavily and often share the same feeding sites at night, usually without conflict.)
How Skunks Find Food
A skunk forages the way it looks: unhurried. Skunks have poor eyesight — useful to only a few dozen feet — and compensate with an excellent nose and sensitive hearing. A foraging skunk quarters slowly across a lawn or field edge with its nose to the ground, listening and smelling for movement beneath the surface, then digs with its long, slightly curved foreclaws the instant something registers. Those claws, closer to a badger’s tools than a cat’s, are why skunk holes are neat inverted cones: one animal, one insect, one quick excavation, repeated fifty times a night.
The slow pace is possible because nothing hunts a healthy adult skunk casually. The famous warning coloration buys skunks a security that shapes their whole feeding style — no need for speed, vigilance, or cover when almost every predator has learned to detour around black-and-white. The great exception is the great horned owl, which like most birds has a poor sense of smell, hunts from above in silence, and takes skunks regularly. It’s the one predator a foraging skunk truly needs to fear, and one reason skunks favor feeding near shrubs and structure over wide-open lawn centers.
A Skunk’s Diet Through the Seasons
| Season | Mainstay foods | Behavior you may notice |
|---|---|---|
| Spring | Grubs, beetles, earthworms, mice, eggs | Fresh digging as soil thaws; hungry animals just off winter fat |
| Summer | Insects of all kinds, berries, small vertebrates, bee and wasp nests | Cone-shaped lawn holes; mother skunks foraging with a line of kits |
| Fall | Grubs plus fruit, corn, nuts, carrion | Heavy feeding to build winter fat; peak lawn-digging season |
| Winter | Carrion, stored body fat, pet food, garbage, occasional mice | Little activity in the cold north; skunks den up and eat little for weeks |
The fall entry deserves emphasis. Skunks don’t truly hibernate, but in cold climates they spend much of the winter dormant in a den, living off body fat — so autumn is an eating sprint, and lawn digging peaks in September and October when grubs are large and skunks are urgent. A yard that suddenly looks aerated overnight in early fall almost always has both a grub population and a visiting skunk.
Skunks also need water, though they’re rarely seen drinking — dew, food moisture, and small sources like pond edges, birdbath overflow, and irrigation puddles cover most of it. In dry late-summer weather, a watered lawn concentrates both soil insects and the skunks that eat them, which is why irrigated suburban turf can out-draw the parched field next door.
Skunk Digging: Reading the Signs in Your Lawn
Skunk foraging leaves a distinctive signature: dozens of shallow, cone-shaped holes an inch or two across, often with a small plug of turf flipped beside each one, scattered across the lawn in loose patches. Compare the culprits:
| Sign | Likely digger |
|---|---|
| Small cone-shaped holes, 1–3 inches, scattered widely | Skunk |
| Sod rolled back or flipped in chunks | Raccoon |
| Raised surface tunnels you can press down | Mole |
| Clean quarter-sized holes with no soil mound | Chipmunk or vole |
| Large excavation at a burrow entrance | Groundhog |
The honest fix for skunk digging is not chasing the skunk — it’s the grubs. When soil insects are scarce, the digging stops and the skunk shortens its visits, and the same grub reduction protects your turf roots from the grubs themselves. Beneficial nematodes and milky spore are the usual low-toxicity routes; timing and product choice vary by region, so a local extension office is worth a call before you buy anything.
Should You Feed a Skunk?
No — for the skunk’s sake as much as yours. A fed skunk becomes a resident skunk: it dens closer, visits more boldly, and eventually meets a dog, a car, or a frightened neighbor at close range, encounters that end badly for skunks. Feeding also concentrates wildlife unnaturally, which spreads disease — a real concern given that skunks, like raccoons, are one of the major rabies reservoir species in North America. Feeding wildlife is restricted or banned in many municipalities. If you enjoy having a skunk around for the pest control, the right way to “keep” it is simply to leave the wild food chain alone and lock up the artificial one: pets fed indoors, garbage lidded, seed swept.
It’s also worth knowing that a skunk cruising your yard at dusk is not a threat looking for trouble. Skunks are near-sighted, placid, and deeply reluctant to spray — the famous defense is a last resort that costs the animal days to recharge. Give a foraging skunk a respectful distance and it will give you the same.
Common Questions About Skunk Diets
Do skunks eat mice and rats?
Mice, yes — regularly. Skunks take adult mice and voles when they can corner them and eat nestfuls of young when they dig them up, making skunks a modest ally against small rodents. Full-grown rats are a different matter: they’re large, fast, and capable fighters, so skunks rarely tackle healthy adult rats, though they will eat dead ones and raid accessible nests.
Do skunks eat cats or chickens?
Cats, no — a skunk cannot catch a cat and doesn’t try; the two mostly ignore each other at shared food sources. Chickens are occasionally at risk: skunks are known primarily as egg thieves, and predation on adult birds is uncommon compared with raccoons or foxes. A coop with a secure floor-level perimeter — buried hardware cloth aprons — removes the skunk risk almost entirely.
Do skunks eat vegetables from the garden?
Less than you’d think. Skunks aren’t drawn to leafy greens or most vegetables; garden damage usually comes from their digging for grubs and cutworms in the beds, not from eating the plants. Low-hanging or fallen fruit, sweet corn knocked to the ground, and melon rinds are the main plant items they’ll actually eat. If something is eating the vegetables themselves, look to rabbits, groundhogs, or deer first — our guide to keeping deer out of the garden covers sorting out which visitor is which.
What do baby skunks eat?
Kits nurse for about six weeks, then begin following their mother on foraging rounds in early summer, learning to dig grubs and hunt insects at her side. A single-file line of half-grown skunks trailing a female across a lawn in June or July is one of suburbia’s better wildlife sights — and a reminder that a skunk family’s whole livelihood is the insect crop in the neighborhood’s soil.
Related Reading
- What Do Raccoons Eat? — the skunk’s nightly foraging partner and competitor
- How to Keep Raccoons Out of Your Deer Feeder — ground-level seed spills feed skunks too
- Do Organic Deer Repellents Work? — how scent-based deterrents hold up against determined foragers
