Pat's Wildways

Bandits at the feeders

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Just about everyone I know has a raccoon story. These clever and adaptable mammals roam freely among us, mostly at night where the only sign of their antics is a knocked-over trash can and maybe a mess. And those oblivious people who leave food out for their outdoor pets often find it overtaken by these “bandits.”

And even worse, on a camp out with gal friends years ago in Fort Clinch State Park, we carefully put all our food in our cars overnight to prevent raccoon thefts but left a cooler filled with ice, beer and sodas on our picnic table. In the middle of the night, we heard a commotion but none of us crawled out of our cozy sleeping bags to investigate further. In the morning, we found out the cause. Raccoons had opened our ice chest and taken out cans of beer — those tan-colored cans. But not the red-colored soda cans — they apparently could tell the difference. And along a game trail back into the woods, we found a few empty beer cans, bitten into at the top by raccoon teeth and emptied. We didn’t find any drunk raccoons, but we didn’t look.

Definitely Procyonids like raccoons are very clever animals. The mammal family Procyonidae includes raccoons, kinkajous, and their kin in the same way that another carnivore family Felidae includes domestic cats, tigers, and cougars, etc. and Canidae includes foxes, wolves, and dogs, etc.

I started thinking about Procyonids on my recent visit to southeastern Arizona in the Chiricahua wilderness area when a coatimundi walked by our porch. Coatis are about the same size as raccoons and as inquisitive and clever, with a pointed snout and long tail often held upright when walking. Coatis are found from Colombia north through Central America and in U.S. areas bordering Mexico, but the first time I’ve encountered them in the United States was in Portal, Arizona a few weeks ago.

Coatis forage mostly in the daytime and are much more observable than night-time foraging raccoons. The coati I watched strolled through our area with a definite mission in mind. I was staying at Cave Creek Ranch where extensive efforts are taken to provide bird-attracting foods of all varieties to draw a great diversity of birds for nature lovers to watch. And, yes, this food attracted other animals too, like this coati.

His first stop was to climb a tree in front of me to lick off the peanut butter that was spread on the bark and before long he was licking his chops and moving on to his next course, the hanging bird feeders full of birdseed. These feeders were attached to a wire between trees, an arrangement that deterred other animals but not him. I watched in amazement as he walked this tightrope using his long tail to balance like a circus performer. One by one he emptied each feeder then took a long drink from a nearby pond before returning to the natural area behind the lodge, out of sight once again.

Although my birdwatching friends much preferred birds at the feeders, as a mammologist I was thrilled at the coati’s appearance. When I next saw Pedro, the person in charge of stocking the feeders, I asked him about the coati. Yes, of course he knew him, and even had a name for him, “Panchito.” According to Pedro, another male coati he named “Juanito” also raids the feeders and approaches from the opposite direction. And sometimes they meet up at the feeders, the edge of both of their territories, and a fight ensues. Coati males are solitary, like these two, but females and their offspring often travel in large groups like I saw not long ago in Costa Rica.

This area in the Chiricahua Mountains has a third Procyonid as well, the ring-tailed cat that is primarily nocturnal and found in the rocky higher reaches of the Chiricahua Mountains, but I didn’t see any this trip. There are also four different species of skunks (family Mustelidae) that roam the Cave Creek Ranch premises, but I only managed to see the common striped skunk that is familiar to us elsewhere in the United States too.

So now I have a great reason to revisit Cave Creek Ranch, this time with Bucko in tow. I will be looking for groups of coatis, different skunk species and maybe even a ringtail, if I manage to be somewhere where they are at night. Heck with the little brown birds — bring on the mammals!

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. [email protected]