Photo: Raccoon Rides Gator Like a Surfboard
OutdoorHub Reporters 06.15.15
Well, that is something you don’t see every day. A man walking through Florida’s Ocala National Forest saw this brazen raccoon riding a small alligator on the Oaklawaha River.
According to WFTV, Richard Jones quickly snapped a photo of the odd pair as they floated past him and his family on Sunday. Despite how it seems, it turns out that the raccoon hasn’t mastered the art of gator riding after all. Instead, Jones said that his son startled the raccoon while on the river’s edge and the animal hopped onto the nearest thing it could find—an alligator. After noticing the amount of teeth that its floating platform had, the raccoon then wisely hopped off.
“I snapped a lucky picture right when the gator slipped into the water and before the raccoon jumped off and scurried away. Without the context you’d think the raccoon was hitching a ride across the river. Pretty amazing,” Jones wrote in an email to WFTV. “Definitely the photo of a lifetime.”
It reminded us of a picture taken earlier this year in England of a weasel riding on the back of a woodpecker. Unlike this scenario, however, the weasel didn’t risk becoming lunch when its mount decided it had enough.
