it’s official / THE VIDEO

The raccoon dog has arrived and lives in Friuli Venezia Giulia. Now it’s official. Its scientific name is Nyctereutes procyonoides. It has a nice face, similar to that of a fox in shape and that of the American raccoon due to its black facial mask. Its tender appearance, however, should not be misleading. It is, in fact, an alien mammal generally considered invasive and harmful to local biodiversity.

The sighting took place on 10 last August and was made by the nature photographer Stefano Pecorella through a camera trap positioned in the lower course of the Torre river, in the province of Udine, in a particular point where the avid nocturnal predator from Aiello del Friuli had already managed to immortalize 5 other carnivores: the golden jackal, the wild cat, the fox red, badger and stone marten.

Pecorella has been collaborating for years in the monitoring of the golden jackal conducted by the Regional Forestry Corps coordinated by the Biodiversity Service of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region. The presence of the raccoon dog, an animal with extreme environmental adaptability, remotely evokes the history of the nutria, another non-native species bred in captivity over the decades by the tanning industry and then completely settled in our territory.

The raccoon dog is a canid native to the Far East (present in Siberia, Vietnam, Korea, China, Indochina and Japan), initially bred in captivity as a fur animal in Russia and subsequently released with the aim of forming wild populations. Over time, these populations then approached and spread throughout Europe, finally reaching Slovenia, Austria and Italy.

Other reports had already occurred in our country in the past, the only two certain in San Pietro di Cadore in 2011 and a specimen hit on the Merano-Bolzano highway in 2016. Also in 2005, among other things, a photographic sighting took place in Socchieve in Carnia, but never confirmed.

As Pecorella explains to Telefriuli, “The raccoon dog is related to humid environments such as swamps and river beds, it feeds on any locally available food source depending on the season, but it can specialize in predation of amphibians. Being the only canid that hibernates, it can locally modify the epidemiology of sylvan rabies infection in ways not yet clear ”.

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