The spotted skunk's handstand is real, and it is a bluff. Threatened, this small skunk will throw its hind end into the air and walk toward the threat on its front feet, a genuine warning display. But when it actually means to spray, it drops back down into a U-shape, both ends facing the threat at once, all four feet on the ground, and fires from there. The handstand is the sign held up before the shot, not the shot.
Even its name is unsettled. A 2022 study split the spotted skunks apart, and the desert Southwest sits near the seam of that split, so this is best called a western or desert spotted skunk rather than pinned to one clean species. It is a small animal, about a pound, glossy black broken into white stripes that fragment into spots, with a white dot on the forehead. Nothing about it reads like the two clean racing stripes of the big striped skunk.
Its stranger trick is in its breeding. After mating in early fall, the female carries the fertilized egg in suspension, unimplanted, for something like 180 to 200 days before it attaches and begins to grow, with the young finally born in late spring. The animal spends more than half a year pregnant with a pregnancy that has not yet started, holding the birth back until the season the desert can actually feed it.
It belongs to rocky ground and brushy draws, to canyons and talus and the cover along a wash, not the open blackbrush flat. None recorded here yet, and it is exactly the kind of small nocturnal animal a camera is far likelier to find than a person is. If you did meet one, and it stood up on its hands, you would be looking at a warning, and would be wise to take it.
The handstand has been known to science for over a century; it was first written up in 1921, though that account watched a different, eastern spotted skunk, so it is really a family habit rather than a record of this desert animal. Whatever prompts the display, this is a small creature with real predators of its own, from great horned owls to bobcats to loose dogs, and the bluff and the spray are most of what it has against them.
The handstand is the question. The horseshoe, both ends aimed at you, is the answer you do not want.