Modesto Daily Evening News

Modesto, California

March 4, 1898

A Strange Animal.

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.

An entire colony of out-of-place coatis have been sighted there.

Accorrding to the North-west Evening Mail:

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.

The coati sighting is the latest of several in this area.

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.

Coatis have been actively reported in Cumbria since 2005.