A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
coati
The coati is a long-nosed, long-tailed relative of the raccoon that ranges from the southwestern United States to Argentina. It walks with the tail held straight up like a flag, which keeps a traveling band in visual contact through brush. Females and young move in noisy groups of a dozen or more; adult males travel alone, which is why the solitary ones were long taken for a separate species. The snout is flexible and it roots with it constantly.
Etymology
The name came into Portuguese from Tupi, a language of coastal Brazil, and it is usually read as belt-nose, from words for belt and nose, describing the way the animal tucks its snout against its belly when it sleeps. The lone males picked up a separate name in Spanish, coatà mundi, which English took as coatimundi and now often uses for the whole animal.
Notes
Coati bands move through the canopy and the leaf litter on the same trip, and they are among the few carnivores that forage as a coordinated group without hunting. In the Chiricahua and Huachuca mountains of Arizona, they are at the northern edge of their range and are a regular sight in canyon campgrounds.