Skunk season

Still not seeing that many amphibians at the fences, but we do have some bays filling and we've opened up part of the drift fence at Ellenton Bay to get some leopard frog pairs for breeding.  Ellenton Bay is a site we use as a reference site to compare to the H-02 Constructed Wetlands and to some coal fly ash studies we do.  Ellenton Bay is now holding water and a decent number of leopard frogs and mole salamanders have gone in.  No egg masses yet but that should come soon. Anyway, we have had some rain and that caused most of the remaining marbled salamanders to leave Rainbow Bay and a bunch more mole salamanders enter the bay.  Unfortunately we also had a predation event.  Sometimes raccoons, possums and/or skunks hone in on the good nights for amphibian to move and they go feast.  The marbled salamanders are distasteful and it looked like something had "sampled" a handful of marbleds and then didn't like what they found and didn't actually eat them.  But they did kill them in the process.  We weren't sure who the culprit was but then we did smell skunk.  Tis the season to see more skunks around as their mating season gets underway.  Today we saw a skunk and I managed to get a few photos with my cell phone.  This one was fairly close to Rainbow Bay and could have been the culprit.  I actually like skunks and even their smell in moderation.  I'd like them even more if they would learn to avoid the distasteful salamanders rather than sampling them again and again. This one has really faint stripes.  We only have two types of skunks in SC: striped skunks, Mephitis mephitis, and spotted skunks, Spilogale putorius.