the front half of my house reeks of skunk right now and I’m done; the epilogue
Original post here (TLDR and rant warning)
So I found the carcass. My original theory (that some animal died under my porch, and then another came along to investigate/eat it and got into a fight with a skunk that also was using that route) was only slightly off.
The dead animal was a skunk. It apparently got crushed when it tried to dig a burrow under my lumber pile. It was probably dead for a while before that heatwave, and then it took a few more days for it to break down enough to release all it’s stink juice (so good news is it did not ‘spray’ but it may have , popped). That would explain the stink inside my house - a fully loaded skunk has enough stink juice for 5-7 sprays (depending on how much they give’r; they can control the size of them).
It did look like something tried to eat a bit of it though; one rear leg was down to bone only. Seriously, removing this thing was the grossest thing I have ever had to do in my entire life. Mangled and in advanced state of decay. Just the feel of it (even with the rubber glove with garbage bag over it) was so gross, never mind the visual. So excuse me if I did not take any pictures.
I think I got lucky though. I have all my lumber on top of an old chunk of wall framing (so it’s not touching the ground and does not rot, except for a leftover scrap (4 foot or so) of 2x12 from when I rebuilt the basement steps). The skunk was mostly on that 2x12 (climbing out of the little dugout it had started underneath) when it was crushed. I was able to grab a scrap of 2x4 and lever the frame (with lumber pile on top ) up enough to get 2 more scraps of 2x4 under it to prop it up. Then I was able to slide out that 2x12 (had to stabilize the carcass with another pc of wood as 1/2 the hind quarters were hanging of and I did not want the thing to rip apart under strain of the weight because it was gross enough already). Once fully exposed I did the trash bag over the hand thing. It was kinda stuck-on/melted into the 2x12 so I couldn’t just flip it over into the garbage bag, had to scrape a bit with my fingers (ew!) to detach it. Obviously I had to toss that 2x12 as there was a black furry/greasy stain on it that would just reek forever. I hosed it down in the gutter as best I could before tossing it in the dumpster across the street.
The good news is that the rest of the lumber is probably fine.This was 2 nights ago and the smell has mostly dissipated (visitors claim to smell nothing; I think I still smell it but that may be mostly the grocery bag worth of mothballs I tossed under there to keep animals away.