#procyon lotor

[crudlynaturephotos]

[crudlynaturephotos]

[sock-ness-monster]

For your viewing pleasure, a Common Raccoon (Procyon lotor) that I saw today trying to enjoy some sunshine, but deciding it wasn't worth the chilly wind and deciding to crawl back into their hole

[snototter]

A common raccoon (Procyon lotor) rests in a tree in Connecticut, USA

by Erika (WhiteEye2)

[thoughtlessarse]

City Raccoons Are Evolving to Look More Like Pets

City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout—a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals

With dexterous childlike hands and cheeky “masks,” raccoons are North America’s ubiquitous backyard bandits. The critters are so comfortable in human environments, in fact, that a new study finds that raccoons living in urban areas are physically changing in response to life around humans—an early step in domestication. The study lays out the case that the domestication process is often wrongly thought of as initiated by humans—with people capturing and selectively breeding wild animals. But the study authors claim that the process begins much earlier, when animals become habituated to human environments. “One thing about us humans is that, wherever we go, we produce a lot of trash,” says the study’s co-author and University of Arkansas at Little Rock biologist Raffaela Lesch. Piles of human scraps offer a bottomless buffet to wildlife, and to access that bounty, animals need to be bold enough to rummage through human rubbish but not so bold as to become a threat to people. “If you have an animal that lives close to humans, you have to be well-behaved enough,” Lesch says. “That selection pressure is quite intense.”

continue reading

[thoughtlessarse]

Want to see a sleeping, snoring raccoon?

Too fucking cute! (No, I don't know where, nor in what, it's sleeping.)

[ratjanitor]

look at this little bitty adolescent raccoon trying to figure shit out on its own

[crudlynaturephotos]