Raccoons have learned to adapt for life alongside humans, and our piles of discarded food, for many thousands of years. For the raccoons that live in Forest Park, that adaptability includes the careful avoidance of crossing the road.
“They often have access to human food, [i.e.] trash, but they're also understanding that the roads are dangerous,” said Dr. Sharon Deem, the director of the St. Louis Zoo Institute for Conservation Medicine. “The ones that are surviving are probably the ones that understand it's best to utilize the food sources from humans that are not on the other side of the road.”
Using GPS collars, Deem and her co-researchers tracked the whereabouts and movement of raccoons in Forest Park between 2021 and 2024 to get a better understanding of how the animals use the park and the areas around it. Their paper on the subject is featured in the December issue of the Journal of Mammalogy.
In addition to confirming that raccoons avoid roadways, their research also provides insight on when raccoons are most active during the year. They found that while raccoons are active for a longer period of time during warm summer nights, their activity moves into a higher gear during the shorter winter evenings.
“It's as if they're working harder and faster to pack as much foraging into their nights [as possible],” said Stephen Blake, study co-author and St. Louis University assistant professor.
They also discovered that the raccoons’ home ranges aren’t as big as previously thought. Of Forest Park’s roughly 1,300 acres, some of the raccoons had territories spanning just tens of acres — the size of John F. Kennedy Memorial Forest at the southwest corner of the park.
Blake said he was particularly intrigued by an adventurous forager named Frankie, whose GPS collar showed him taking regular excursions outside his range within Kennedy Forest.
“About three nights out of six, [Frankie] would cross [Interstate] 64 and go into Dogtown, and we're thinking, ‘How on earth is he doing that?’” Blake said. “It turns out he was using the drainage culverts that go under I-64. We put a camera trap up and [found that] loads of raccoons are scuttling between Forest Park and Dogtown to hang out in the dumpsters and take advantage of all the food sources over there.”
In order to download data from the GPS collars, Blake would often track them on foot.
“I'd be wandering around Dogtown at midnight with a radio antenna and a big radio,” he said. “One night, someone came out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I'll give you 500 guesses, and you'll never get it.’ So we radio tracked together, and we found this raccoon in a dumpster. It was fast asleep with a full belly.”
Raccoons are one of 16 animal species that Blake and Deem study within Forest Park as co-principal investigators of the Forest Park Living Lab. While raccoons thrive in human-modified environments like city parks, Deem said other species are not so lucky.
“Habitat fragmentation [due to] an expanding human footprint is leading to the loss of other species,” she said.
A key focus of the Forest Park Living Lab is to inspire people to connect with the natural world. It offers programs for adults and children on species including box turtles, coyotes and birds of prey. Deem said their aim is to help people understand how biodiversity benefits humans and wildlife alike.
“This project is about understanding this amazing, biodiverse green space right here in our city and how important green spaces in nature are for human health,” she said.
To learn more about raccoons — including recent evidence that they are showing signs of domestication and the story of a raccoon that was recently found passed out drunk in the bathroom of a liquor store — listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Darrious Varner is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
