Idaho’s 243 raccoon records spread across 32 counties, from Ada and Canyon in the Snake River valley to Latah and Bonner in the north. Wherever the state offers permanent water with trees or cover nearby, the raccoon finds a way.
A waterline omnivore
A raccoon’s front paws are nearly as nimble as a primate’s, and it puts them to work feeling for crayfish, frogs, and clams along muddy shorelines, though it will just as readily take corn, fruit, eggs, and whatever a farmyard or town offers. That flexibility ties it to river corridors, to wetlands like those at Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge, and to the settled edges of Idaho’s valleys.
No true winter sleep
Raccoons do not hibernate. In hard cold they hole up in a hollow tree or den for days at a stretch, living off stored fat, but Idaho’s record shows them abroad in every month of the year, with no real gap between November and February.
Status in Idaho
NatureServe ranks the raccoon S5, Secure, in Idaho, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
