PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. — At a wildlife center on Mississippi's Gulf Coast, the trainees arrive small, hungry and unprepared for life on their own. The instructors are rescue workers. The lessons include digging for food, opening pine cones, fishing in shallow water and running up trees when danger calls. Woodside Wildlife Rescue calls it raccoon boot camp.
The goal is to give abandoned, sick or injured raccoons a head start on the skills they would normally learn from their mothers. Many of the kits arrive after storms, traffic accidents or other traumatic events have separated them from their families. City animal-control workers and residents call Woodside Wildlife Rescue or its director, Raquel Priest, when they find a raccoon in need.
Paula Woodside, who founded the rescue, opened it in 2019 after helping rehabilitate a baby raccoon found aboard her ship. The former U.S. merchant mariner now spends much of her time caring for the animals in the Mississippi heat. The work can leave her muddy, sweaty and scratched by frightened raccoons, but she says the early help matters when a kit is desperate.
The rescue typically raises dozens of raccoon kits each year alongside other indigenous wildlife. It had cared for 76 kits so far in 2026, according to the Associated Press. The youngest animals spend their first weeks mostly indoors, where rehabbers bottle-feed them. Once they have been vaccinated for diseases carried by cat colonies and dogs, they can move into outdoor pens.
Woodside Wildlife Rescue has a rural 20-acre property with meadows, thick forest, ponds and a nearby river. That space lets Woodside and Priest take the raccoons on learning excursions while the animals remain close to their human caregivers. The setting also gives the kits room to practice the behaviors they will need after release.
The staff teach by example. They hide worms in dirt so the kits can watch them dig, and they break open pine cones or acorns to expose the seeds inside. When a kit finds something tasty, it may run back to show its rehabbers before returning to guard the discovery from another young raccoon. Those small repetitions turn curiosity into useful behavior.
The instructors also use sounds to teach the animals when to move. A shrill trill imitates a raccoon danger call and sends the kits up trees for safety. A short whistle signals that the coast is clear. In shallow pools, the raccoons practice fishing by patting at the water until they become quick enough to catch a snack. A live quail hunt provides additional hunting experience.
Swimming is another central lesson. On the property's pond, the rehabbers take to kayaks and encourage the kits to swim back and forth. Woodside and Priest consider the skill critical in hurricane-prone south Mississippi. During trips into the deep woods, the young raccoons practice moving from tree to tree, where they can avoid birds of prey and keep an escape route from snakes and other hazards on the ground.
Before release, the kits have one final unsettling lesson. A volunteer who is neither Woodside nor Priest traps them in cages. The experience is meant to frighten the animals enough that they learn to avoid traps and humans, while also helping them separate naturally from the rescuers who raised them. Priest said that independence develops as the raccoons mature.
About six months after rescue, a group that is ready to leave receives a graduation ceremony. Staff play Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance Marches” and read a roll call of the graduating kits’ names. A reverend blesses their journey, and the raccoons are released onto a different section of the rescue’s forest-covered property.
The ceremony marks a careful handoff rather than an ending. The animals have been fed and protected by people, but the purpose of the work is to return them to the habitat where they can live as wild raccoons. The training cannot remove every danger from that future. It is meant to improve the odds that the kits can find food, climb, swim and respond when the landscape becomes threatening.
Woodside Wildlife Rescue also holds a ceremony for kits that die in care, blessing them before their ashes are scattered. The losses are part of the emotional cost of rehabilitation, just as the scratches and long days are part of the physical work. For the staff, success means eventually seeing a once-dependent kit leave and behave like the mischievous wild creature it was meant to be.
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