Seventy-six orphaned raccoons went to boot camp in Mississippi. The final lesson is avoiding people

Muddy, sweat-soaked and occasionally bloody, the staff at a Mississippi wildlife center spend their summers as drill sergeants. Their recruits are baby raccoons.

Woodside Wildlife Rescue, in the coastal city of Pass Christian, has taken in 76 orphaned, sick or injured raccoon kits so far this year. What the staff there call raccoon boot camp is an attempt to teach those kits the skills their mothers would have taught them — mothers who mostly died, or were separated from their litters by storms, traffic and other accidents. 1

"When these babies come in, and they're so desperate, it's heartbreaking," says Paula Woodside, who founded the rescue. "It's really important for them to get a little bit of a head start." 1

Woodside is a former U.S. merchant mariner. She opened the rescue in 2019, after helping rehabilitate a baby raccoon that had been found aboard her ship. 1 The animals now arrive by phone call: animal control officers and residents ring Woodside or the rescue's director, Raquel Priest, when they find a kit in a yard, a shed or at the side of a road. Woodside and Priest try first to put the kit back with its mother. 1

The youngest spend a few weeks indoors, bottle-fed by hand until they have been vaccinated against diseases carried by dogs and cat colonies. Then they move out to pens on the rescue's 20 acres of meadows and thick forest, with ponds and a river nearby. That setting lets the rehabbers take the kits out on lessons, which Woodside says is rare among wildlife rescues. 1

The teaching is done by example. Priest and Woodside hide worms in the dirt to show the kits how to dig for food, and break open pine cones or acorns to reveal the seeds inside. When a kit meets a new food its eyes light up, and it runs to show the rehabbers before hurrying back to guard the find from the other kits. 1

Instead of shouting "Attention", the two women give a shrill trilling sound that copies the raccoon call for danger; the kits run up the nearest tree. A short whistle tells them the coast is clear. 1

At the pond they learn to swim, with the rehabbers following in kayaks and coaxing the kits back and forth — the lesson that surprised me most, and the one that matters most in hurricane-prone south Mississippi. They also practise fishing in shallow pools, and a live quail hunt gives them hunting practice. On trips into the deep woods they learn to run from tree to tree so that birds of prey do not see them, and to keep a fast route away from snakes on the ground. 1

For the final lesson, the job of trapping the raccoons in cages is given to a volunteer, rather than to Woodside or Priest. The fright is the point: it pushes the kits to avoid traps and the people who set them, and to depend less on the rehabbers who have fed them. 1

About six months after a kit is rescued, graduation day arrives. The staff play Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" and read a roll call of the graduating kits' names. A reverend blesses their journey, and they are released onto a different stretch of the rescue's forest. For kits that die in care, the staff holds a second ceremony, to bless and scatter their ashes. 1

The rescue is an all-volunteer nonprofit that runs on donations, with no subsidy from local, state or federal government, and its team drives more than 1,000 miles a week picking up, moving and treating wild animals. Donations can be made online or by cheque to Woodside Wildlife Rescue, PO Box 43, Pass Christian, MS 39571. 2

Its own guidance for anyone who finds a healthy-looking kit is to leave it where it is and check back within a few hours: litters wander off while their mother sleeps or forages, and she will usually come for it. Wear gloves if you have to handle it, because raccoons can carry rabies without symptoms, and do not offer it food. If the kit is still there when you return, call a licensed rehabilitator; in Mississippi it is illegal to raise wildlife as a pet. 3

"It's like watching your children leave home," Priest says. "It's important to see them prosper and go and be the mischievous creatures they were meant to be." 1