Raccoon (Procyon lotor): Facts, Diet, Habitat and Intelligence

Appearance

A raccoon is easy to recognize. Its face has a black mask across the eyes, set off by white fur above the eyes and around the muzzle, and its rounded ears are edged in white. The bushy tail carries four to ten dark rings. The rest of the coat is grizzled gray, often with brownish tones, made of long guard hairs over a very dense underfur that makes up almost 90% of the coat and keeps the animal warm in winter.

The body is stocky with a hunched look, because the hind legs are longer than the front legs. Raccoons walk flat-footed, like bears and people, and leave tracks that look like small human hands. The five long fingers of each front paw have no webbing and are tipped with sharp claws that cannot be pulled in.

Raccoons can rotate their hind feet so that they point backward, which lets them climb down a tree headfirst, a rare skill for a mammal of their size. Raccoons in the German introduced population are more often very dark, because some of the founding animals had dark coats.

How big is a raccoon?

Raccoons vary in size more than almost any other mammal, depending on where they live. The smallest live in southern Florida and the Florida Keys, while the biggest are found in the north of the range, where a larger body helps to hold heat.

Males are usually 15–20% heavier than females. Weight also swings with the seasons: a northern raccoon can weigh almost twice as much in early winter as in spring, thanks to its stored fat. The heaviest wild raccoon on record weighed about 28 kg (63 lb).

Habitat and range

Raccoons are native from southern Canada through the United States and Mexico to Panama. Their original home is deciduous and mixed forest, especially lowland woods with streams, ponds and marshes, where they can find both water-based food and hollow trees for dens. The highest densities, more than 20 raccoons per square kilometer, occur in wet lowland forests and marshes.

Since the 1940s, raccoons have spread and multiplied enormously. Their range has pushed north into the Canadian prairie provinces and into mountains, prairies and coastal marshes. Above all, they have moved into towns: raccoons have lived in cities such as Toronto, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York since at least the 1950s, sleeping in attics, chimneys, sheds and old trees.

People have also carried raccoons far beyond the Americas. Escapes and deliberate releases in the 20th century created wild populations in Germany and its neighbors, in parts of France, Spain and Italy, in Belarus and the Caucasus, and across Japan. The story is told in are there raccoons in Europe?

What do raccoons eat?

Raccoons are true omnivores and among the least fussy eaters of any mammal. Studies suggest their diet is roughly 40% invertebrates, 33% plant food and 27% vertebrates, although it changes greatly with the place and season.

In spring and early summer they eat many insects, worms, snails and other small animals. Near water they catch crayfish, frogs, fish and tadpoles, and they raid the nests of birds and turtles for eggs. In late summer and autumn they switch to fruit, berries, acorns, walnuts and other nuts, along with corn, which helps them build up fat for winter. Raccoons only occasionally catch larger, fast-moving prey such as adult birds or mammals. In towns, garbage, compost and food left outside add to the menu. Read the full story in what do raccoons eat?

Super-sensitive paws and the “washing” habit

Touch is the raccoon’s most important sense. The skin of its front paws is packed with nerve endings and covered by a thin, horny layer, and almost two-thirds of the part of its brain that handles the senses is devoted to touch. Raccoons can feel and identify objects with their fingers in muddy water or total darkness, and stiff whiskers near the claws help them sense things before they even touch them.

This sensitivity explains the famous “washing”. The scientific name lotor means “washer” in Latin, and the German name Waschbär means “wash-bear”. Raccoons often rub food between their paws in water, but they are not cleaning it. Water softens the horny skin on the paws, which seems to make them even more sensitive, and in captivity the behavior looks like a leftover of the way wild raccoons dabble for prey along the shore. More detail is in why do raccoons wash their food?

How smart are raccoons?

Raccoons are among the cleverest small carnivores. In a classic study published in the early 1900s, the psychologist H. B. Davis found that raccoons could open most of a set of 13 complex locks, many of them in fewer than ten tries. Later studies showed that raccoons can remember the solution to a task for at least three years.

Their brains back this up. A raccoon has about 450 million neurons in its cerebral cortex, roughly the number found in many dogs and nearly twice as many as a domestic cat, packed at a density more typical of primates. In cities, raccoons are known for working out how to open latches, lids and bins. See how smart are raccoons? for the research.

Behavior and social life

Raccoons are mainly nocturnal. They spend the day resting in a den, usually a hollow tree, rock crevice, old burrow or building, and they switch dens often. They are good climbers and strong swimmers, able to swim at about 5 km/h (3 mph).

Raccoons were long thought to be solitary, but studies since the 1990s show a looser social life. Related females often share an area and meet at feeding places, while unrelated males may form small groups of up to about four that hold a territory together during the mating season. Home ranges vary hugely, from a few hectares for city females to many square kilometers for males on open prairie.

Raccoons communicate with a wide range of sounds, including purrs, chitters, growls, snarls, hisses and screams; at least 13 different calls have been described, several of them used only between a mother and her kits. In the north, raccoons do not hibernate, but they sleep through cold, snowy spells in a winter rest, living off their fat.

Reproduction and kits

Raccoons mate mainly between late January and mid-March, though the timing varies by region. After a pregnancy of usually 63–65 days, the female gives birth in a sheltered den to a litter of usually two to five kits. The father plays no part in raising them.

Newborn kits weigh only 60–75 g (2.1–2.6 oz) and are blind and deaf, but their face mask is already visible. Their eyes open after about three weeks, they begin to leave the den at around 8–10 weeks and they are usually weaned by about 16 weeks. The family breaks up in autumn; young females often settle near their mother, while young males may move more than 20 km (12 mi) away. In cold regions, a mother and her young may share a den through their first winter.

Lifespan, predators and threats

Most wild raccoons live only about two to three years; studies give an average life expectancy of 1.8–3.1 years. Often only around half of the kits born in a year survive to their first birthday. A few wild raccoons live past ten, and the oldest recorded in the wild reached about 16 years, while captive raccoons can live more than 20 years.

Natural predators include bobcats, coyotes and great horned owls, and in the southeast, American alligators. Today people cause most raccoon deaths through road traffic and hunting and trapping for fur, which can account for up to 90% of adult deaths in some areas. The most common natural cause of death is canine distemper, a viral disease that can wipe out local populations. Raccoons can also carry rabies; in the eastern United States they are one of the main wild carriers of the virus.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List classifies the raccoon as Least Concern, with a very large population that is increasing. North America’s raccoon population grew dramatically after the 1940s as farms, suburbs and cities offered new food and shelter while large predators declined.

Some island raccoons are another matter. Small populations once treated as separate species, such as those of the Bahamas, Guadeloupe and the Tres Marias Islands off Mexico, are now counted as subspecies of the common raccoon and remain vulnerable, and the Barbados raccoon has died out. The closely related Cozumel raccoon of Mexico is a separate, critically endangered species. Outside its native range, the raccoon is an invasive species: since 2016 it has been on the European Union’s list of Invasive Alien Species of Union Concern.

Raccoons and people

Raccoons have a long place in the cultures of the Americas. The English name comes from a Powhatan word recorded in colonial Virginia that refers to an animal that scratches with its hands, and in many Indigenous stories the raccoon is a clever trickster. In modern towns, raccoons are both admired and resented for raiding bins, gardens and corn fields, and for denning in attics.

Wildlife agencies advise people to enjoy raccoons from a distance and never feed them, because fed raccoons lose their fear of people and gather in unnatural numbers. Their droppings can contain eggs of the raccoon roundworm, a parasite that rarely but seriously infects people, so latrines should not be touched. Anyone bitten or scratched by a raccoon should seek medical help immediately.

A few myths are worth correcting. A raccoon out in daylight is not necessarily rabid, since mothers often feed by day in spring. Raccoons are not a kind of bear or panda, and they are not the same as the raccoon dog of East Asia, which is a member of the dog family. And they do not wash food to clean it: they are feeling it. Compare the raccoon with other adaptable North American neighbors such as the coyote and the bobcat.