Small Game
Procyon lotor
Photo: California Department of Water Resources via Wikimedia Commons (PD) · PD · Source: commons.wikimedia.org
Conservation status
Least ConcernTag difficulty (general)
Over-the-counterVaries by state and unit.
Methods generally used
The raccoon is the only North American game animal with a culture built specifically around night hunting and hounds. Twelve to twenty pounds, omnivorous, adaptable enough to live on a city dumpster or a swamp creek, the raccoon is the quarry of one of the deepest hunting traditions in the country — coon hunting, almost always at night, almost always with a small pack of treeing hounds (blueticks, redbones, walkers, black-and-tans, plotts), almost always on foot in big timber. The dogs strike, trail, and tree; the hunter walks in by headlamp through laurel and creek bottom; the coon glares down from a sycamore crook and gets taken with a .22 rimfire. The social side — coon hunters' associations, nite hunts, breed registries, field trials — is a separate world from gun-hunting and operates on its own calendar and its own gospel. Outside hound work, raccoons are also taken by predator callers and by trappers in big numbers for fur. Eating is divisive: properly prepared (gland removal, slow braising), it's serviceable; carelessly handled, it isn't. Populations are robust to massively over-abundant essentially continent-wide.
Continuous across the lower 48 states and into southern Canada from coast to coast, absent only from the highest alpine and the driest Great Basin. Densest in the eastern hardwoods and southern bottomland. Introduced and established in Europe and Japan. Continent-wide population is in the tens of millions; raccoons thrive in suburbs and farmland.
Lowland deciduous forest, riparian corridors, swamp, marsh edge, farmland with woodlots, suburbs, and urban green space. Needs den cavities (hollow trees, ground burrows, attics, culverts) and standing or moving water. The most habitat-flexible mid-sized mammal on the continent.
A very large share of raccoon harvest happens under trapping regulations rather than hunting regulations, primarily for fur. Foothold traps in dirt-hole or pocket sets, body-grip traps in cubbies, and dog-proof tube traps designed to defeat the raccoon's hands but not larger carnivores are all standard. Trapping is regulated separately from hunting in every state.
Daylight or night calling with mouth-blown or electronic calls (raccoon-distress, mouse-squeaks, bird-distress) in known travel corridors. Less common than coyote calling but works during cold weather when coons are tight to den sites and respond to easy-meal cues. Typically with a centerfire rifle or shotgun.
The classic night method: a small pack of treeing hounds is turned loose in coon country after dark, strikes a fresh track, runs the coon to a tree, and bays at the trunk until the hunters walk in by headlamp. The coon is shined in the upper crook with a headlamp and taken with a .22 rimfire. A full-cultural ecosystem of breeds, kennels, registries, and field trials sits on top of this method.
Legal methods, weapons, and seasons vary by state and unit — confirm with the issuing agency before you hunt.
Alexas_Fotos via Wikimedia Commons (CC0) · CC0
California Department of Water Resources via Wikimedia Commons (PD) · PD
We're still verifying which game-management units carry Raccoon.
Outdoors won't publish species-unit assignments until the source agency has been hand-checked.
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