White-nosed Coati

About the White-nosed Coati

The White-nosed Coati is the raccoon's lanky tropical cousin, a long-tailed, long-snouted omnivore that forages by day with its banded tail held straight up like a flag. Females and young travel in sociable troops that can number in the dozens, snuffling through leaf litter with flexible, upturned noses.

Coatis range from South America north through Mexico, barely reaching the United States in the mountain canyons of Arizona, New Mexico, and very rarely far West Texas, where a sighting is a genuine event.

These photographs were taken at Parque Ecologico Chipinque above Monterrey, Mexico, where a troop worked the forested mountainside in classic coati fashion.