Video: Raccoon Mom Teaches Kit How to Climb

Have you ever wondered how animals like raccoons learn to climb? When it may seem natural, even raccoons take time to master this vital skill, and they do that by imitating their mothers. This video, taken by Jeffrey Reid in Port Townsend, Washington, is one of the clearest examples of a mother raccoon teaching a kit—a young raccoon—how to climb a tree.

“She’s saying, ‘Watch me, now you do it,” Joesph Travis, a biologist at Florida State University, told National Geographic. “The mother is going to keep putting it on the trunk until the kit figures it out.”

According to experts, kits generally learn climbing at around two months old when their muscles and reflexes are already well-tuned. This kit, however, looks to be only a month old, so it may be off to an early start.

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