英语听力：自然百科 臭鼬的日记

This new mom has six helpless kids. The babies are born with black and white markings on their naked skin that are soon covered with fur of the same pattern. At the age of four weeks, they open their eyes for the first time. In another three weeks or so, around the time of weaning, mom will lead them on their first trip out of the den. This mother seldom leaves her kids alone, that's because if a male enters the den, even the dad, he's likely to kill her babies.

Jerry Dragoo's pregnant female has given birth.

What a good girl you are! Yeah, you are being really good!

And she and her new kids are doing well.

You get a few of them in there, don't you?

But not all baby skunks are so lucky.

We're coming down.

Another litter lost their mother at a very young age. Dragoo picked them up from New Mexico Game and Fish. For these six-week old orphans, he's acting in loco parentis, but many would call him just plain "loco".

Okay, who wants to be the first? Come on. When we got them, they were hungry. They were being fed cat food. Cats require a lot more protein in their diet than skunks do. And a lot people, for some reason, seem to think skunks and cats are closely related, but really they're not. So we switch them over to the puppy formula real quick.

And your teeth are starting to come in. Yeah, here you go. That's what you are looking for.

The babies are born ready to spray.

They don't have quite as much oil, so it's more of a, kind of a "poof" rather than a liquid. You get the same odor, but it just doesn't last with these guys.

The kids won't start eating solid food for another couple of weeks.

There you go! There you go!

Come on, you characters! Come here. Come on.

You see, the female has got a lot of white on her tail; and then these two males, they've got a little white tip on their end; and this guy, I call him Blackie 'cause he didn't have a white tip.

With 30 to 80 skunk guests a year, Gragoo finds it challenging to get on a first-name basis with all of them.

Let's go this way. Come here. We used to run out of names. You can't call them all "Flower" or (Where have you gone? Come here.) "Stinky” or "Peppy".

Come on, sweetie. There you go.

Dragoo will release these four orphans as soon as they can fend for themselves.