Wildlife of Henry W. Coe State Park
Beechey Ground Squirrel · Black-tailed Jackrabbit · Bobcat · Coyote · Mountain Lion · Mule Deer · Raccoon · Striped Skunk · Valley Pocket Gopher · Wild Pig
Raccoon
Procyon lotor
Young raccoon near park visitor center.
6 March 2005.
Photograph copyright © by Gena Zolotar.
Used with permission.
Raccoons are commonly seen at Coe Headquarters, usually in the evening or after dark. There, encouraged by easy pickings from careless campers—or even by foolish ones who feed them
because they are cute—they subsist on human food. Because of this, they can be both stealthy and
bold, suddenly appearing on a picnic table after dark and making off with campers' food. They will
even climb through the open windows or tailgates of parked vehicles to look for something to eat.
On one stay at the headquarters campground, I soon learned that if I got back to my tent after dark,
I would find a raccoon in it. They know how to open tent zippers! (I had no car to store food in, and
their are no food lockers there.) Though I knew their hand-like paws were capable of unzipping tents,
even I was surprised to awake one night and find a raccoon in the tent with me—and I had to tie
the twin tent flap zippers together to keep it out. Similarly, one evening when I returned to camp from
a hike, I had chased a raccoon out of the tent, but hadn't been too worried about it getting my food.
I had stashed my food in a large zippered backpack and had locked the tabs of the double zippers together. Nevertheless, food was strewn about: The raccoon had pulled apart the twin zipper tabs as
far as they would go, and had reached into the pack and extracted handfuls of dry spaghetti through
the narrow slot!
Don't think that if you feed them (illegal, by the way, and bad for the raccoons in the long run), they will
go away satisfied. If you feed them, they'll come back with their friends. And the one that visited my
tent left behind a flea or two!
Though I have seen raccoon tracks in many places in the Coe backcountry, I never saw the living mammal more than a few miles from Coe Headquarters. Even with food in my tent, I was never visited by raccoons in the backcountry. I would occasionally hear of raccoon problems by campers at Manzanita Point, less frequently at Frog Lake, and rarely at China Hole, but no farther out than that.
—LD
Henry W. Coe State Park, California
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