As Northwest Territories skunks go, this one looked pretty happy.
Brent Kotchea, passing by on Highway 5 east of Hay River, filmed the skunk noodling around in the foliage near the road this month, looking perfectly at home.
He shared the video to Facebook with one simple question: “What on earth?”
A skunk bops along by the side of the highway near Hay River. Video: Brent Kotchea
“A lot of people don’t know about the skunks,” said Pete Cott, a manager in the NWT government’s wildlife management division, after Cabin Radio sent him the footage.
“Since this came up today in my inbox, I’ve been talking to people about skunks and a lot of people had no clue.”
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The GNWT’s website carries a file on the striped skunk, Mephitis mephitis, which lists two sightings of skunks near Enterprise and Louise Falls, 15 years ago, as possibly the first on record in the Hay River area.
In Fort Smith, they’re more of a common sight.
“I looked on iNaturalist, for instance, and there were two striped skunk reports for the Northwest Territories, both around Fort Smith in May 2024 and 2025,” said Cott, referring to a website where people can submit their own sightings of flora and fauna.
Suzanne Carriere was a territorial wildlife biologist until she retired 18 months ago. She loved the work.
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“That job is to be the whatever-ologist,” she said. “When people don’t know what it is, usually it would end up on my table. What I told everybody was: I don’t know how to identify some species, but I know people that know. It’s always about who you know.”
In a bid to expand who she knew, Carriere helped grow a Facebook group named NWT Species. She considers it one of the few good reasons to be on Facebook – a chance to share sightings and information about plants and animals with others.
Over the years, NWT Species has helped illuminate for Carriere that there might be more skunks in the South Slave than the GNWT previously thought.
“They’re not new to the Fort Smith area but they show up in Hay River once in a while,” she said.
“There’s probably a population farther south, south of Fort Smith. There are usually skunks at the dump. Skunks really like humans. They get mad at them because humans bother them, but they like human habitat, or they survive in human habitat.”
Vagrant raccoons
There’s another common North American animal that most people insist can’t be found in the territory: the raccoon.
Yet there are also records of raccoon sightings in the North.
The territorial species infobase has a sighting logged in 2003, describing a large male being live trapped at Fort Fitzgerald and a female with young “also hanging around there.”
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There’s nothing on record since, but that doesn’t mean raccoons can be entirely ruled out.
“There are reports of raccoons. They haven’t been established. Raccoons haven’t really made their way westward or northward that much – they’re only starting to get established in Edmonton, for instance,” said Cott.
“We’ve got them listed in our species report as a vagrant. One could have hitched a ride on a truck or something like that.”
A vagrant, Carriere explained, is an animal that reaches a specific area (like the NWT) but doesn’t reproduce there and isn’t seen regularly.
“You need to be able to move. So a plant will never be vagrant, for example. But bats can be vagrant. Lots of birds can be vagrant,” Carriere said. “And it’s really, really important to keep track of those, because it tells you a lot about the state of the environment here and also elsewhere.”
“I would love for people to tell me if they have seen raccoons in Fort Smith in recent years. I would not be surprised. Even a small animal like a raccoon or a skunk can walk, of course, and they can explore. They are kind-of creeping up north but sometimes they don’t make it, and then you don’t see any for decades,” she continued.
“So when you say there’s no raccoon in the Northwest Territories, you’re probably right, but people will probably call the government or call you and say, ‘You’re wrong, I’ve seen them.’”
How about in Yellowknife?
Cott says tracking the presence of skunks – or for that matter, raccoons – in the NWT is important because it helps to establish how species’ ranges are changing with the climate.
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“We’re seeing species like these moving more northward with our climate warming,” he said.
“Twenty years ago, there weren’t a lot of magpies around. There weren’t as many coyotes. A lot of these animals, as conditions become more favourable, are moving farther north, expanding their range northward.”
But, he said, the “charismatic macrofauna” of the North – the likes of caribou – “take a lot of our attention, obviously, and rightfully so,” leaving skunk tracking to amateur enthusiasts who take the time to add sightings to iNaturalist or NatureServe.
He urges anyone who spots a skunk (or raccoon) to log it on one of those websites or report it to the Department of Environment and Climate Change.
“Once that ID has been confirmed by a few sources, it becomes a scientifically credible observation,” he said. “That’s useful for tracking change over time and for assessment reports for biodiversity, understanding what kinds of species we’ve got.”
He also has one more tip for skunk spotters: “Most people know this, but don’t… don’t annoy the skunk.”
Carriere, meanwhile, says Yellowknife remains devoid of skunks even if the South Slave has a few who’ve made the region home.
“If you smell a skunk in Yellowknife,” she said diplomatically, “it’s something else.”
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