Only two mammals in Florida’s atlas outrecord the raccoon, and its 11,688 records reach all 65 counties. The heaviest counts sit where the people are, Miami-Dade, Orange, and Broward, a map that says as much about the raccoon’s comfort around humans as it does about the state’s wild land.
Never far from water
A raccoon’s front paws are packed with touch receptors, and it works the shoreline with them, feeling for crayfish, crabs, and frogs in the shallows. Florida’s record tracks that habit closely. Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park and Oleta River State Park lead the urban coast, Rookery Bay and the Loxahatchee refuge hold the mangrove and wetland interior, and Everglades National Park fills in the marsh between them.
Busy all year, busiest in spring
Counts stay above 500 in every month and crest in March, when kits are born and nursing females forage harder and more openly. Florida’s mild winters never push the raccoon into the deep winter torpor it uses farther north, so it keeps feeding year-round, shifting between marsh, hammock, and neighborhood as food allows.
Status in Florida
NatureServe ranks the raccoon S5, Secure, in Florida, and G5 rangewide. The species is native to the state, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
