Bunk’s skunk & varmint removal

07/13/2026

Could use them here

The loggerhead shrike is a songbird the size of a mockingbird that kills mice by biting the back of the neck and shaking its head so fast that the mouse's spine snaps from whiplash. High-speed video showed the force reaches six gs. Then it impales the body on a thorn or a strand of barbed wire because its feet are too weak to hold the carcass while it eats.

The shrike looks harmless. Gray body, black mask, black-and-white wings, hooked bill. It perches on telephone wires and fence posts across open grassland, ranch country, and desert scrub from southern Canada to Mexico. It could pass for a mockingbird from a distance. Then it drops off the wire, hits a mouse at speed, locks onto the base of the skull with its beak, and rolls its head at 11 revolutions per second.

Diego Sustaita, a vertebrate biologist at Cal State San Marcos, led the study. His team filmed 28 attack sequences using high-speed cameras running at up to 250 frames per second on San Clemente Island, California, where the U.S. Navy and the San Diego Zoo operate a captive breeding program for the endangered San Clemente loggerhead shrike subspecies. When the researchers slowed the footage down, they found something that had been invisible at normal speed.

The shrike bites the nape and pinches the spinal cord to induce paralysis. Then it begins shaking. The rolling motion runs at 6 to 17 cycles per second. At peak velocity, the angular speed reaches 71 radians per second. The mouse's body whips around its own neck as a pivot. But the head and body do not move in unison. The footage showed them progressively shifting out of phase, the head rotating one direction while the body lagged behind, then snapped the other way. The effect is like wringing a wet towel. Simultaneous flexion and extension of the cervical vertebrae from opposite directions generates compressive forces that the mouse's spine cannot withstand. Sustaita estimated a peak instantaneous acceleration of six gs on the mouse's body, comparable to the whiplash a person experiences in a low-speed rear-end car collision. For a mouse, it is fatal.

The killing method exists because of a mechanical limitation. A red-tailed hawk or a great horned owl kills with its feet. Raptors have thick, muscular toes armed with curved talons that generate enough crushing force to kill prey on contact. A shrike does not. Its feet are standard songbird feet, thin, light, and built for perching, not for killing. It cannot grip a mouse hard enough to crush it. It cannot carry heavy prey in flight the way a hawk does. It kills with its beak, and the beak alone is not strong enough to dispatch a mouse that weighs 40 percent of the shrike's own body weight. The violent shaking converts the prey's own mass into the killing force. The heavier the prey, the more destructive the whiplash.

The impaling serves the same mechanical function. A shrike that kills a mouse needs to tear it apart to eat it, but it cannot hold the carcass steady with its feet the way a raptor pins prey under a talon. Instead, it carries the dead mouse to the nearest sharp object, a thorn, a broken twig, a barb on a fence line, and pushes the body onto the point until it holds. The thorn becomes a vise. The shrike tears strips of meat from the carcass while the spike keeps it from moving. Ranchers and birders who find small animals impaled on barbed wire fences across the western United States are looking at a shrike's pantry.

Males stockpile. A 1989 study on a related shrike species in Israel found that males with the largest caches of impaled prey attracted mates earlier and sired more offspring. The impaled bodies are not just food storage. They are a display. A fence line decorated with dead mice, lizards, and grasshoppers is a male shrike advertising that he can kill.

Source: Sustaita et al. (2018), Biology Letters / Science / Audubon / Science News / The Nature Conservancy.

07/13/2026

07/13/2026

Good morning 🌞
All these years 😂

06/10/2026

That's some fierce competition, right there! 👍🏻

A striped skunk walks through a meadow at two in the morning carrying the most effective chemical weapon in North American wildlife. Two glands under its tail can spray a sulfur compound called butyl mercaptan up to fifteen feet with accuracy, and the smell is detectable by a human nose from over a mile downwind.

The spray causes temporary blindness, nausea, and a burning sensation that does not wash off with soap or water. Every predator in the eastern forest knows what a skunk smells like and what happens if you get too close. Coyotes leave them alone unless starving. Foxes avoid them. Bobcats will kill one occasionally and spend the next hour rubbing their face in the dirt regretting it. The skunk walks through the night with the confidence of an animal that has solved the predation problem.

Then something drops out of the sky that cannot smell anything.

The great horned owl is the skunk's primary predator. Not occasional predator. Not opportunistic predator. Primary. Great horned owls eat skunks with enough regularity that wildlife biologists use skunk remains in pellets and nests as a reliable indicator of owl activity.

Taxidermists and nest surveyors can identify a great horned owl's nesting site before they see it because the tree stinks. The scent glands that keep every ground predator in the county at a safe distance do nothing to an animal attacking from thirty feet above at forty miles per hour with no functional sense of smell.

Most birds have limited olfactory capability compared to mammals. Great horned owls are on the extreme end of that spectrum. The olfactory region of their brain is small relative to their total brain volume, and their olfactory bulbs are reduced compared to bird species that do rely on smell, like turkey vultures.

The owl can detect enough scent to taste food, but the concentration of butyl mercaptan that would send a coyote gagging into the next drainage registers as background noise in the owl's nervous system. The skunk sprays. The owl does not care. The spray hits feathers that the owl will preen clean within hours. The skunk's entire defense, the product of millions of years of evolutionary pressure, is neutralized by an attacker that lacks the hardware to process it.

The mechanics of the kill compound the problem for the skunk. A skunk defends itself by turning its back, raising its tail, and spraying in a directed stream aimed backward and slightly downward. The defense is designed for ground-level threats approaching from behind or from the side. A fox circling a skunk gets sprayed in the face. A dog lunging at a skunk gets sprayed in the eyes. The spray's targeting geometry assumes the threat is on the ground.

A great horned owl attacks from above and behind in near-total silence. Owl flight feathers have serrated leading edges that break up turbulence and suppress the sound of air moving over the wing. A great horned owl in a hunting dive is functionally silent. The skunk does not hear it coming. The strike hits the back of the skull or the shoulders, and the talons, which can exert roughly 300 pounds per square inch of crushing force, kill or immobilize the skunk before it can orient its spray glands toward the threat. The attack comes from the one direction the skunk cannot aim, delivered by the one predator that would not be affected if it could.

A striped skunk can weigh up to nine pounds. A great horned owl averages three. The owl routinely kills prey that outweighs it by a factor of two or three, including rabbits, marmots, and house cats. Its talons are strong enough to sever the spinal cord of a skunk on contact, and when the prey is too heavy to carry whole, the owl feeds on it where it falls or dismembers it and carries pieces back to the nest. A three-pound bird killing a nine-pound mammal that is chemically armed with one of the most repulsive substances in the animal kingdom is not a fair fight. It is a design mismatch where one animal's primary defense is irrelevant to the only predator that hunts it consistently.

Source: National Park Service / Cornell Lab of Ornithology / Naturally Curious with Mary Holland / Center of the West.

04/18/2026

Cats will roam!

Sometime in the fall of 2009, a young male cougar left the Black Hills of South Dakota and started walking east.
He was around a year and a half old. About 140 pounds. He had been born into a population of roughly 250 breeding cougars in the Black Hills, one of the only viable mountain lion populations left in the center of the continent. Young males his age disperse when it is time to find territory and a mate. They usually travel about a hundred miles.
He traveled seventeen hundred.
Biologists were able to reconstruct his route afterward because he left a trail. Not tracks. DNA. His blood was collected in Minnesota in late 2009. His hair was found in Wisconsin. His s**t was identified three separate times across the state over the following months. Citizen trail cameras photographed him in Wisconsin and Michigan. Each sample was stored. Each sample matched.
He crossed Minnesota. He crossed Wisconsin. He passed through Michigan. He crossed into New York. He kept going.
Nobody knows why he did not stop. Cougars do not typically cross the Mississippi. They do not walk through states that have not held a resident cougar in a century. They do not cross highways and suburbs and farmland for two years straight. This one did.
By June 2011, he had reached Connecticut.
No mountain lion had been confirmed in Connecticut since 1880. A hundred and thirty-one years. The eastern cougar, the subspecies that had once lived in every state from Maine to Georgia, had been declared extinct. The forests where they had hunted for thousands of years were still standing. The deer they had eaten were more abundant than ever. The only thing missing from the landscape was the cougar itself.
And then one walked back in.
He was spotted first in Greenwich, near the coast, in early June. Then he moved inland. On June 11, 2011, he was crossing the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Milford when an SUV hit him. The driver was not hurt. The cougar died on the road.
When officials examined the body, they assumed he was an escaped pet. A wild cougar in Connecticut was impossible. Then the lab results came back from Missoula, Montana. He was not an escaped pet. He was not neutered. He was not declawed. He had no microchip. He had porcupine quills embedded under his skin from somewhere along the journey. He was a wild cougar from the Black Hills of South Dakota who had walked for two years across half the continent, alone, through territory no cougar had crossed in living memory, and he had made it all the way to within a few miles of the Atlantic Ocean.
A mammal ecologist from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said afterward that the cat had been looking for a mate. "He was looking for love in all the wrong places," he said.
There was nothing wrong with the places. The forests of New England are cougar habitat. The deer are there. The terrain is there. The only thing that is not there is another cougar.
He walked seventeen hundred miles to find one.
He was the only one who came.

04/15/2026

Hello. I'm the bird walking headfirst down your oak trunk.

Not up. Down.

I'm a White-breasted Nuthatch — and I'm the only bird in your yard that routinely forages by descending. Woodpeckers go up. Creepers spiral up. I go down. And I find the insects they miss.

When a woodpecker climbs a trunk, it looks into the crevices from below. When I walk down, I look into those same crevices from above. Different angle. Different prey. We share the same tree and never compete because we're searching opposite surfaces of every crack in the bark.

I weigh about as much as four nickels. My feet have one large toe facing backward and three facing forward — I move one foot at a time, keeping the backward toe locked into the bark as an anchor. I don't need my tail to brace me. I just grip and walk.

My mate and I hold this territory year-round. We don't migrate. We don't leave. We chase other nuthatches out and we know the alarm calls of every chickadee and titmouse in the neighborhood, because we winter with them in a foraging guild.

You hear me every day and don't know it. A nasal yank yank yank from somewhere on the trunk. That's me, telling her where I am.

🌿 Where to find me:

- Any mature deciduous tree — oaks especially
- Look for the bird going the wrong direction on the trunk
- At your feeder, I grab one sunflower seed and fly away to crack it on a branch

The bird doing everything backwards is doing it on purpose. 🐦

04/15/2026

Who doesn't love songbirds?

04/13/2026

I am proud to announce that I have been certified to take coyotes.

Spring is the time of year when most animals will bare their offspring and the coyotes are no exception. As they raise their young their quest to feed them will intensify. So it is important to be extra vigilant about the whereabouts of your pets and livestock.
Also make sure that you poultry coops are shored up
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns and I would be more than happy to help you
May you all have a safe and uneventful Spring.