Kidzone Super Heroes Raccoons

Raccoon Superpowers

Compared with most mammals, raccoons have four to five times more sensory cells in their paws. They can get an image of what an object is without even looking at it, so the raccoons actually see with their hands.

They are opportunistic eaters. Their meals include nuts, berries, fruits, acorns, grasshoppers, mice, fish, frogs, insects, small mammals, and ground-dwelling birds and their eggs. Raccoons are also adept scavengers. They rummage through garbage cans and compost piles and steal pet food left outside overnight. They climb bird feeders and dine on birdseed, as well.
They seem to wash their food before eating It. In a study of 136 raccoons, researchers in Nova Scotia found that wetting the skin on the raccoon’s front paws helped increase the responsiveness of those nerves. But even when there’s no water around, the dunking ritual helps them grip their food and get it to their mouths.
They’re not picky about where they live, as long as there’s water nearby. Raccoons make their dens in the ground, hollow trees, or crevices in rocks. In more urban areas, they venture into homes and make dens in attics, chimneys, and crawl spaces underneath houses.

Raccoons are related to bears.
Their masks are anti-glare devices.
Raccoons can count up to three.
They are very handy. Raccoons have five toes on their front and back paws. Their fore paws are particularly dexterous and actually look and work like slender human hands,
Raccoons experience two thirds of their world through their paws. They contain 4-5 times as many sensory cells as the rest of their body.
Raccoons are mostly solitary animals. As nocturnal creatures, they rarely venture out during the daytime, and they try to stay close to their den, only traveling far enough to get what they need to eat and drink.
They like urban settings for the ease of acquiring food.
They have a lot of babies.They breed only once per year, but a female will give birth to three or four babies on average.
Raccoons can stand on their back legs and inspect objects with their nimble front paws.
In cold regions, raccoons stay in their den during the winter. However, they don’t enter a state of true hibernation, but they sleep and rest a lot.
Raccoons are excellent swimmers.

Raccoons are beneficial to ecosystems for the distribution of plant seeds. Feeding on berries and nuts, not only on meat, raccoons then help distribute the seeds around the areas they inhabit.
Raccoons also eat carrion, or the remains of dead animals, and feast on small rodents and insects. This keeps areas clean, which in turn helps to keep pest populations in check
In addition to scavenging, raccoons are also predators. Grubs are a favorite food, but they’ll also seek out wasp larvae, rodents, small snakes and other smaller critters.

With the struggles our bees have been having, one important role for raccoons is bee protection. When the masked ranger feasts on the larvae of wasp species, it is providing a valuable service for the protection of bees.
Through their efforts in seeking food in the soil, they help with soil turnover. This improves aeration, which is good for plant recruitment and speeds up decomposition.
Raccoons are also a source of food for larger animals such as hawks, owls, coyotes and even young snakes.

“One Columbia friend told me about one night when, as she cried on a bench in Riverside, a raccoon came up to her and stared at her with a look of understanding. She said it felt like some sort of message. It seems any student I talk to who has crossed paths with these small fellows, Barnard or Columbia, feels a sense of kinship with them. …their presence made me so at peace that I had the strength to keep going. …Every time, seeing the raccoons brought me a little light in what felt like a dark city. I am not exaggerating when I say I can’t imagine my life without them. …I walked further down the pathway to find another group of raccoons, these ones clamoring over the trees. “Don’t fall!” said a little girl. “Don’t worry, they won’t fall,” her brother said wisely. “They’re helping each other, look!” Sure enough, when I looked up, the bigger raccoons were carefully watching to make sure their smaller brethren didn’t tumble. … They remind me to be curious. They remind me to be resourceful. They remind me to let myself hibernate when I need it. I believe that all of us can learn from these critters.”

“…apparently these raccoons came by one day and stole his girlfriend’s shoes. But they were just sitting outside. They came by, stole the shoes, and then a few days after that the shoes were back where she’d left them, except now they’ve been washed.

They’ve been so like the raccoons washed the shoes or what. … One of the earliest and most famous studies of raccoon intelligence was carried out in the early d by this animal behavior scientist named H. B. Davis, and he rounded up a dozen wild raccoons and then presented them with a series of puzzle boxes, each of which was baited with a piece of food and outfitted with a different kind of lock. …So the raccoons have to contend with a variety of lock types, including hooks, bolts, buttons, latches, and levers I guess, and some boxes even had multiple locks, like two buttons or a push bar and a lift latch, and so it gets pretty complicated. But despite Davis throwing everything he could at them, in the end, the raccoons could, I guess, open eleven of the thirteen different complicated lock types, and most of the animals mastered a few of them in fewer than ten tries. …So the raccoons have to contend with a variety of lock types, including hooks, bolts, buttons, latches, and levers I guess, and some boxes even had multiple locks, like two buttons or a pushbar and a lift latch, and so it gets pretty complicated. They may be cute, but they definitely look like outlaws.

Raccoon Superpowers

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