Just a few days into my Seattle relocation, the friends who generously housed us, pointed to some ruckus in a tree. Since ruckus in a tree often signals animal activity, I grabbed my camera and crept into the shade of a Northwest canopy.
Overhead I saw this … a family of four North American raccoons (Procyon locator), mama and three grown kits. They’d been foraging on fruit trees, zeroing in on their favorite Italian prunes. The mother raccoon, maternal and instructive as mother raccoons are, led three growing juveniles on a hunt for sustenance in my friend’s garden.
It was a unique opportunity to watch and photograph a raccoon family in daylight, something that happens more often during kit-rearing season when the need for food brings raccoon families into the light and beyond their dusky, crepuscular ways.
Most of these photos were all shot in deep shade, at high ISO, with a lot of backlighting from the sun.
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Mama raccoon eating Italian prunes off the tree
