Tree climbing lessons for a raccoon cub

February 20, 2016 • 2:30 pm

Yes, “cub” is the proper name for the young of the raccoon (Procyon lotor). And it’s hard not to anthropomorphize this video, sent by reader Diane MacPherson, of a mother raccoon showing her cub how to climb a tree. In fact, what mom’s doing is bloody obvious—and also adorable. As Diana noted, “this is cute, but the poor baby gets kind of dragged on the face at one point.”

This was filmed in Port Townsend, Washington.

Apropos of this video, I’ll recount an anecdote involving not one but two immortal physicists. When I was a student at Rockefeller University—before I left to do conscientious objector work—I was helping George Uhlenbeck, discoverer of the spin of the electron*, move his books from one office to another. (One of my friends was his student). As we sweated away, Uhlenbeck told us in a thick Dutch accent, “As Professor Einstein told me, knowledge is very heffy!

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*It’s not clear to me why Uhlenbeck didn’t win the Nobel Prize for this discovery

29 thoughts on “Tree climbing lessons for a raccoon cub”

  2. I like the part when she looks back at the baby & tries to nudge him with her face & paws as if to say, “Come on, like this! Look! Give me your paws!”

  4. That vid was adorbs.

    Your anecdote reminded me of another, told in my Common Core Physics class by the late Peter Meyer, who was a student of Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger Counter. Geiger was in turn a student of Lord Rutherford. Meyer related the story told by Geiger that, after Rutherford had mapped the structure of the atom, Geiger asked Rutherford how he managed to be on the crest of the wave of discovery all the time. Rutherford replied, “I make the waves!”

  5. That cub would probably remind a lot of my previous teaches what it was like dealing with me.

  6. I live in Toronto, quite likely the world`s urban raccoon capital, with at least 100,000. A very divisive creature for many. Some homeowners hate them for their ability to break into supposedly raccoon-proof garbage bins, for their occasional forays into homes, but I among those whose admiration for these nimble, intelligent, adaptable creatures is boundless. About a year ago, I had a mother and three newborns nesting under my bedroom floor. When the adolescents were able to fend for themselves, I evicted them. Very early the next am, there was a rapping on the bedroom window that led to a my deck. Pushing aside the curtain, I saw three juvenile raccoons, standing against the window and looking affronted at losing their home.

    1. Ha ha “Excuse me sir, I believe you may have inadvertently kicked us out of our home. Do you mind opening the door & letting us re-enter?”

  9. Great video, I admit to being surprised that tree climbing doesn’t come more naturally to raccoons.

  10. Much gibbering in the raccoon dialect. It’s like first cliff day of the year for the students at the mountaineering club.

  12. Discovering the spin of the electron wasn’t the only thing Uhlenbeck did. The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process (a Brownian motion that has a linear force returning it to a particular value) is widely used to model all sorts of things. In 1976 Russell Lande suggested using it to model characters undergoing genetic drift while moving on an adaptive peak. It’s very big right now in modeling quantitative characters changing along phylogenies.

  15. Lol, what a sweet and hilarious vid!

    We Moms can’t possibly get enough credit for the journey…

    1. That makes me think of my poor mom who learned how to ice skate when I was a toddler (and she did well – she had to learn as an adult since she came to Canada from New Zealand) and I used to lay on my back and kick at her with my skates because I didn’t want to go home.

      In my defence, I had other qualities that made me adorable.

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