Nearly every skunk call comes with the same worry: what happens when you try to move it. Handled calmly, spraying is uncommon. Handled in a hurry, it is close to guaranteed.
Why they chose under your deck
Skunks want a dark enclosed space with a single defensible entrance and soft ground to dig in. Deck skirting, shed floors, porch steps and crawl space openings all qualify.
Spring is den season, which is when most calls come in. If it is spring, assume young until proven otherwise.
How removal is done without spraying
Slowly and quietly. Skunks spray when startled or cornered, and they give warning first: stamping, raised tail, a short charge. Work that respects those warnings rarely results in a discharge.
Where young are present, the den is opened carefully and kits are removed by hand and kept with the mother so the family relocates together.
Why barrier trenching matters more than trapping
Remove a skunk from under a deck and leave the gap open and you have created a vacancy in prime real estate. Another skunk, or a groundhog or opossum, will take it.
A dig-proof barrier is hardware cloth trenched down and turned outward in an L shape along the perimeter. Animals dig at the edge, hit the horizontal return and give up. A barrier that simply goes straight down gets dug under.
The lawn holes
Cone-shaped divots across the lawn are skunks digging for grubs. That is a food source on your property, and it will keep drawing them back regardless of how many you remove.
Treating the grubs is a genuine part of the solution, not an upsell. It is often the difference between a one-time job and an annual one.
The smell
Residual den odour under a structure does not clear with air freshener. Odour neutralising treatment at the source is what works, applied after the den is cleared.
If a pet has been sprayed, the peroxide and baking soda approach outperforms tomato juice by a wide margin. Keep it out of the eyes.