Skunks active

February 25.
For a day or two past I have seen in various places the small tracks apparently of skunks. 

They appear to come out commonly in the warmer weather in the latter part of February.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 25, 1860

They appear to come out commonly in the warmer weather in the latter part of February. See February 24, 1854 "The other day I thought that I smelled a fox very strongly, and went a little further and found that it was a skunk.”); February 24, 1857 ("I have seen the probings of skunks for a week or more..”): March 6, 1854 (“I see the skunk- cabbage started about the spring at head of Hubbard's Close, amid the green grass, and what looks like the first probing of the skunk.”); March 10, 1854 ("See a skunk in the Corner road, which I follow sixty rods or more.  . . . Its track is small, round, showing the nails, a little less than an inch in diameter, alternate five or six inches by two or two and a half, sometimes two feet together.”)