What Do Raccoons Eat? The Complete Diet of North America’s Cleverest Omnivore

Written By: Ian @ World Deer

Raccoons eat almost anything: crayfish, frogs, insects, grubs, bird eggs, small rodents, fruits, nuts, corn, and carrion in the wild — plus garbage, pet food, bird seed, and garden produce wherever they live near people. They are true omnivores and among the most adaptable foragers in North America, shifting their menu with the seasons and taking whatever their remarkably sensitive front paws can find.

That flexibility is the secret to the raccoon’s success. The species (Procyon lotor) has expanded from river-bottom forests into farmland, suburbs, and dense cities precisely because it treats the entire landscape as a buffet. Understanding what raccoons eat — and when — explains most of the raccoon behavior people notice around their homes, from tipped trash cans to raided bird feeders and rolled-back squares of new sod.

Raccoons Are Opportunistic Omnivores

A raccoon’s digestive system handles both plant and animal foods, and its behavior is built around opportunism rather than pursuit. Raccoons are not fast, and they rarely chase anything down. Instead they patrol likely food spots on a nightly circuit — a streambank, an oak grove, a cornfield edge, a row of trash cans — and investigate everything by touch. Whatever is abundant, easy, and energy-rich wins.

The classic estimate from food-habit studies is that a wild raccoon’s yearly diet works out to very roughly one-third plant matter, one-third invertebrates such as insects and crayfish, and one-third vertebrates and everything else — but the mix swings dramatically with season and habitat. A raccoon living along a Georgia creek eats a very different diet from one living behind a Chicago restaurant, and both thrive.

What Raccoons Eat in the Wild

Aquatic prey: crayfish, frogs, and fish

Where water is available, it anchors the raccoon’s diet. Crayfish are a signature food, along with frogs, salamanders, freshwater mussels and clams, aquatic insects, and the occasional slow or stranded fish. Raccoons hunt these by wading the shallows and feeling under rocks and ledges with their forepaws — those paws carry an extraordinary density of touch receptors, and wetting them appears to heighten their sensitivity even further.

Insects, grubs, and other invertebrates

On land, invertebrates make up a huge share of warm-season meals: beetles and their larvae, grasshoppers, crickets, earthworms, snails, and the fat white grubs of scarab beetles that live just under lawn turf. Grub-hunting is why homeowners sometimes wake to find chunks of sod flipped over or rolled back like carpet — a raccoon can strip a grub-infested lawn with startling efficiency in a single night.

Eggs, nestlings, and small vertebrates

Raccoons are notorious nest predators. They take the eggs and young of ground-nesting and cavity-nesting birds, and they are one of the most significant predators of turtle nests in North America, digging up freshly laid clutches along pond banks. They also eat mice, voles, young rabbits, snakes, and carrion of all kinds, including roadkill — a habit that puts many raccoons on the road themselves.

Fruits, nuts, and crops

From late summer through fall, plant foods dominate. Wild grapes, persimmons, blackberries, cherries, apples, and pawpaws are all favorites, and acorns become a staple as autumn progresses. Field corn in the milk stage is legendary raccoon food — a family of raccoons can flatten a corner of a cornfield or destroy a backyard sweet-corn patch the very night before you planned to pick it.

A Raccoon’s Menu Through the Year

Raccoons do not hibernate, but in cold climates they den up and live largely off body fat for weeks at a stretch. That makes the fall feeding binge a matter of survival, and it shapes the whole year’s eating pattern.

Season	Mainstay foods	What’s driving the menu
Spring	Crayfish, frogs, insects, earthworms, early greens, leftover nuts	Protein for recovery from winter and for nursing mothers
Summer	Insects and grubs, bird and turtle eggs, berries, garden produce	Abundance everywhere; kits learning to forage
Fall	Acorns and other nuts, corn, apples, grapes, persimmons	Hyperphagia — packing on fat reserves for winter denning
Winter	Whatever is available: carrion, stored fat, garbage, pet food	Scarcity; raccoons in cold regions may lose a large share of body weight

By the first hard frosts, a northern raccoon may carry close to half its body weight as fat. Southern raccoons stay active and forage all winter, which is one reason the species reaches its highest densities in mild, food-rich landscapes.

The seasonal swing also changes what homeowners notice. Spring and summer complaints are about digging — grubs under the lawn, worms under mulch, nests raided. Fall complaints are about volume: trash cans, corn patches, fruit trees, and feeders all hit hard by animals eating with real urgency. If raccoon pressure on your property suddenly spikes in September and October, nothing is wrong; you are simply on the route during the annual fattening sprint.

What Raccoons Eat in Cities and Suburbs

Around people, raccoons simply add our food streams to their natural ones. The big four attractants are unsecured garbage, outdoor pet food, bird feeders, and compost. Add fish ponds, chicken coops, fruit trees dropping fruit, and vegetable gardens, and a suburban block can out-produce prime bottomland forest — which is why urban raccoon densities can run many times higher than rural ones.

Garbage: a loose lid is an open invitation; raccoons learn routes and return nightly to reliable cans.
Pet food: a bowl of kibble left on the porch is the single easiest meal a raccoon will ever find.
Bird seed: feeders, spilled seed, and suet all draw raccoons after dark — the same problem deer hunters run into, which is why we wrote a separate guide on keeping raccoons out of a deer feeder.

Gardens and coops: sweet corn, melons, grapes, and unsecured chickens or eggs are all high-value targets.

If your vegetable beds are getting hit at night, the fixes overlap heavily with deer defense — secure fencing and removing easy rewards — and our guide to keeping deer out of the garden covers fencing principles that, with an electrified strand added low, stop raccoons as well.

How Raccoons Find Food: Paws First, Then Everything Else

Raccoons forage with their hands the way most animals forage with their nose. The naked skin of a raccoon’s forepaws is packed with mechanoreceptors — a share of the brain’s sensory cortex devoted to the forepaws that is unusually large among carnivores — and a foraging raccoon often stares off into the middle distance while its fingers do the searching. This is how they extract crayfish from under submerged rocks they cannot see, locate grubs beneath sod, and identify food items by touch alone in total darkness.

Layered on top of that touch sense is genuine problem-solving intelligence. Classic laboratory work found raccoons could open complex multi-step latches and remember the solutions for a year or more, and every wildlife control operator has stories of raccoons defeating bungee cords, lever handles, and “raccoon-proof” bins. Combine dexterous hands, a good memory for reliable food locations, and a willingness to test everything, and you get an animal that treats a suburban block as a puzzle box full of calories — and solves it a little more completely each season.

This is also why half-measures fail. A raccoon that has once been paid off by your garbage can will keep testing it for weeks after you upgrade the lid, and it will check the porch every night long after the cat’s bowl moves indoors. Persistence is not spite; it’s a foraging strategy that has served the species for a very long time.

Do Raccoons Really Wash Their Food?

Not in the way the old story suggests. Raccoons in the wild often dabble food items in water, and captive raccoons famously carry food to a water dish and manipulate it there — the behavior behind the species’ scientific name lotor, “the washer.” But the animal is not cleaning its dinner. Researchers interpret the dousing as tactile foraging: a raccoon’s forepaws are its primary sense organ, and working an object underwater lets the animal “see” it with its hands in extraordinary detail. A raccoon will happily eat filthy food without a rinse when no water is handy.

Should You Ever Feed Raccoons?

No. Deliberate feeding is the fastest way to create a problem raccoon. Fed raccoons lose their wariness of people, concentrate in unnatural numbers, spread disease among themselves at shared food piles, and eventually den in someone’s attic or chimney. Raccoons are also rabies vector animals, and anything that brings them close to people and pets raises the stakes of an encounter. Feeding wildlife other than birds is illegal in many municipalities, and feeding raccoons specifically is prohibited in a number of states. Enjoy them at a distance, and keep the food sources on your property locked down.

A raccoon that has learned to associate your yard with food can be persistent, and a mother with kits doubly so. If nightly visits have already started, removing every food reward — garbage, pet food, seed, fallen fruit — is the first and most important step in turning them away.

Common Questions About Raccoon Diets

What is a raccoon’s favorite food?

There is no single favorite, but foods that combine high calories with easy access top the list: crayfish where water is available, grubs and insects in summer, acorns and corn in fall, and — around people — pet food and food waste. In taste-preference terms, raccoons show a strong pull toward sweet foods, which explains their enthusiasm for fruit, sweet corn, and marshmallows (a common bait used by wildlife researchers).

Do raccoons eat cats or small dogs?

Essentially never. Adult cats and raccoons generally ignore or avoid each other, and a raccoon has little interest in tangling with a dog. Genuine fights are usually over food bowls or occur when a pet corners a raccoon. The realistic risks to pets are disease transmission and injury from a defensive fight — not predation — though very small kittens left outdoors could be vulnerable. Feed pets indoors and the issue largely disappears.

Do raccoons eat squirrels or rabbits?

Occasionally, but mostly as nestlings, young, or carrion. A healthy adult squirrel or rabbit is far too fast for a raccoon to catch in a fair chase. Raccoons are gatherers and ambush opportunists rather than pursuit predators, which is why eggs, larvae, and slow aquatic prey feature so much more heavily in their diet than warm-blooded prey does.

How much does a raccoon eat in a day?

Intake varies enormously by season, but a rough figure for an active adult is on the order of one to two pounds of food a night during the fall fattening period, and considerably less in spring and summer. Raccoons are not steady eaters; they gorge when food is abundant and coast on fat when it is not.