Coatis Galore: 1898 to Present

One evening this week A. J. Woodson, who lives near Hill’s Ferry, discovered a strange animal in a tree near his place and after quite a lot of trouble succeeded in capturing it. The animal is about the size of an ordinary house cat; has a head very much like a fox; feet with claws similar to a cat, and a ringed tail much longer than its body. No one has seen the animal here could name it, but a reference to the natural history shows a picture of the same animal classified as a “Ring tailed Maki,” and Madagascar and adjacent islands as its home. Doubtless this is one that has escaped at some time from a menagerie. The animal will be sent to the city for sale. — Newman Index.

(This old article was found by Jerome Clark. This capture represents not a lemur from Madagascar, as suggested, but probably an out-of-place coatimundi from the more tropical Americas.)

Coatis have a way of turning up in the strangest places, when you least expect them. One was killed in Nebraska in 1968. Going from 1898 in California, let us fast forward to the first week in August 2006, to Cumbria, to the town of Furness, beyond the Lake District in the United Kingdom.

They’re a long way from home but it seems a colony of South American coatis may have settled in Furness. A string of sightings culminated in one of the three-foot-long, meat-eating mammals being tranquilliser darted from a tree in a Lindal garden. Householder Rob Hewitt, 64, of Low Farm Close, Lindal, said: “I was sitting in a deckchair in my back garden when this face came round the corner of the house and I thought — you don’t have a UK passport.

“It was as big as a Labrador dog. A big yellow and ginger thing with a bushy tail with rings on it. Like a raccoon, but the wrong colour. It turned round the corner and hissed at me. It wasn’t scared or anything. It climbed on the side of the wall and up on to a wall and it sat there looking at me.”

Rob rang South Lakes Wild Animal Park. But staff there said they had no missing coatis.

Eventually, park owner David Gill had to use a tranquilliser to sedate the animal before he could catch it.

One was spotted near the tarn at Great Urswick, another was in the playground of Chetwynde School, Barrow, and a third was seen in Barrow Park.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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