The Hunger Moon
Bill Meredith
The fox knows many things; The hedgehog knows one big thing.
....Aristotle, or someone like that
February 2 came on schedule this year, and
the local news media pushed aside their headline
stories about earthquakes, senate debates, and
the faltering economy to inform us that
Punxutawney Phil had come out of his burrow on
Gobbler’s Knob to see his shadow and go back
to bed for another six weeks. Groundhogs have
never been known for either ambition or
intellect—as Pogo once said, "They’s
jes’ lazy rascals"—but Phil knew what
he was doing. February is no time to be running
around outdoors if you can avoid it.
For anyone who has to be out in the
environment, it is February, not April, that is
the cruelest month. To some Indian tribes and to
our colonial forefathers in New England, the
full moon in February was known as the Hunger
Moon; it indicated the time of greatest
hardship. Winter was still in full swing, food
stored the previous fall was either getting
wormy or running out entirely, and hunting and
fishing were harder and less productive. If you
made it through the Hunger Moon in those days,
things soon started looking better; spring wasn’t
too far off, and your chances of survival for
another year improved. Like the proverbial
hedgehog, groundhogs know this one big thing:
stay indoors until the Hunger Moon is past, and
then some.
It may seem odd to be using groundhogs as a
standard of good sense, but not all animals are
that smart. Skunks in particular come to mind—
or to nose, if you want to be literal. I smelled
my first skunk of the year on Jan. 31, which is
about average for the time when they re-enter
the landscape. They go underground in late fall
in a hollow log or, preferably, an abandoned
groundhog burrow if they can find one; they plug
the entrance with grass, leaves and dirt, and go
into a deep sleep.
The females seem to have the
good sense to sleep late, but males begin to
stir around the first of February. It doesn’t
make much sense in terms of human logic; there
is little to eat then except garbage and
carrion, the weather is miserable, predators are
hungry, and prospects for finding their heart’s
desire are slim. But where love is concerned,
human logic means little even to people, and
absolutely nothing to skunks. Their biological
clocks have been running, and hormones have
started to flow; so they leave the warm bedroom
for the cold, cruel world outside under the
Hunger Moon.
Male skunks don’t wake up in a
very good mood even under the best of
circumstances, and now they’re cold and hungry
as well as oversexed; and to make it all worse,
the only skunk they’re likely to run into is
another male in the same frame of mind. So they
let off steam— loaded with butyl mercaptan—
at the least provocation. This probably doesn’t
affect the outcome of battles between males; it
discourages some predators, although one of
their main enemies, the great horned owl, doesn’t
seem to mind it. And it doesn’t deter
automobiles at all; for the next several weeks,
skunks will be among the commonest of road kills.
As a child I was taught skunks were to be
counted among the enemy. My mother was sure all
of them were rabid. Grandma, with not much more
factual evidence on her side, believed their
sole mission in life was to kill her chickens.
Several times each year our dog would come in
reeking, eyes watering, sick at his stomach, and
wearing a look that said, "Yeah, I should
know better by now." My Uncle Fay, who
lived just up the road from us, was in some ways
worse than the dog; he waged a skunk vendetta
for years.
He was an inventive man and liked to
do things with style; he usually won, but the
victories were pyrrhic, or at least smelly. One
spring a possum began hanging around his yard
just when the baby chicks were starting to
wander about. He didn’t want to shoot it so
close to the house, with kids and livestock
hanging around; so he built an elaborate
deadfall consisting of a large rock propped up
by a small stick, to which he tied some meat as
bait. That night a skunk found it before the
possum did, and the next day he had the task of
removing a hundred-pound rock from a carcass
that was about half an inch thick and a lot
wider than it used to be, and steeped in a most
un-possum like redolence. Another time, he found
a skunk hiding under Grandma’s chicken house
and ran for his gun; he killed it, but not
before it fired back, and no one could stand to
collect the eggs for a week.
In my dotage now, I rather like skunks—at
an appropriate distance, of course. I find them
interesting for several reasons. We used to call
them "polecats," a name that was
brought across the Atlantic by our colonial
ancestors; it is correctly applied to an equally
smelly relative, the European weasel. They
belong to the weasel family, which zoologists
call Mustelidae. As the name suggests, all
weasels have scent glands; skunks have simply
perfected them to a greater degree than the rest
of the family.
Weasels as a group are,
pound-for-pound, the most ferocious carnivores
on the planet; fortunately, most of them are
small, but the big ones, like the wolverine, are
so vicious that they are left alone even by
wolves and bears. Skunks, by comparison, are
peace-loving fellows; for survival, they have
traded the family’s usual physical violence
for a chemical defense. This enables them to
waddle placidly through life rather than tearing
about like Tex Avery’s Tasmanian Devil. They
have evolved a color pattern, the white stripe,
which makes them readily visible; and throughout
their history, when meeting a larger animal,
their reaction has been to raise their tail and
wave it to attract attention. Most of their
enemies are sufficiently warned, after one
meeting, to leave them alone. Unfortunately,
automobiles never seem to learn this lesson.
There are occasional cases of rabies, but
most skunks are free from it, and most people
don’t get close enough to them to have to
worry about it. Grandma’s beliefs to the
contrary, documented cases of chickencide are
rare; if they find a dead chicken they will gnaw
on it, and they might kill young chicks if the
opportunity arose. But their preferred diet
consists of insects, berries, and mice. They
will eat the young of ground-nesting birds if
they happen to stumble upon them, but they do
far less damage to bird populations than house
cats. Mostly they prefer to go about their own
business, a trait to be admired in a world so
complicated as this.
The Hunger Moon waxed full on Feb. 6 this
year, and there was still snow on the ground
from before Christmas; but as it waned into the
third quarter a week later, the temperature
reached 60 for the first time this year and I
saw a flock of about 40 robins in the field next
to mine. So if you see a skunk, wish him well
and tell him to take heart; if he can avoid owls
and cars just a little longer, spring will come
and the females will awaken. Where there’s
love, there is hope for yet another year.