A ‘catcoon’ invaded a store and stayed for 3 weeks. Then Florida deputies took action

One unusual Kohl’s customer came in looking not for name brands like Eddie Bauer, Lands’ End or Nine West — but rather ceiling tiles and shoe boxes.

“Welp, I guess Kohl’s really does have everything!” a would-be humorist commented on a Jefferson County Sheriff’s Facebook post Monday about what officers and store staffers found inside a Kohl’s store in the Big Bend region of Florida.

Deputies dubbed the peculiar customer a “catcoon” because it looked like a raccoon crossed with a cat. It’s neither, though it’s a mammal of the raccoon family. It was a ringtail.

“This little guy was in the Kohl’s store off S. Kipling Parkway for three weeks. He was hiding out in the shoe department and eating ceiling tiles and shoe boxes. He would sneak in and out of our cat traps and get the food without tripping the mechanism,” deputies said on the Facebook post.

The savvy and creature was safely captured and released into nearby woods.

What’s a ringtail?

“Ringtail are sometimes wrongly called ringtail-cats or miners cats. They are not related to cats at all. Their relatives include the coati and the racoon,” according to Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

Ringtail’s distinguishing feature are its long tails that can extend almost a foot and a half of alternating bands of white and black fur. Big eyes, surrounded by white rings of fur. Large rounded ears, short legs and a long grayish body, the museum says.

The agile ringtail uses that tail for balance while climbing — or apparently while shopping at Kohl’s department stores for ceiling tiles or shoe boxes.

What do ringtail eat?

These omnivores will eat fruit, insects, lizards, snakes, mice, woodrats, squirrels, birds and bird eggs, according to the museum, which suggests Kohl’s didn’t have the right product mix on its shelves no matter what the reader wrote on the sheriff department’s Facebook post.

Ringtail are timid and we’re much bigger than they are so they don’t attack humans. But if threatened they could act with aggression and their little mouths have 40 teeth.

How big do ringtail get?

Dubbed “the cutest animal in North America” by Live Science, ringtail can grow to two feet and up to 32 inches and weight about two pounds. They don’t meow like a cat, rather they emit a raspy, plaintive screech — as the Florida Kohl’s one did inside the trap — that could, perhaps, unkindly be likened to singer Stevie Nicks with a head cold.

Where do ringtail live?

The nocturnal mammals generally live in the southwest Oregon, California, southern Nevada and Utah, western Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Louisiana, according to Live Science. But every once in a while some make it to Florida and one into a Kohl’s department store.

In August 1986 the ringtail became the state mammal of Arizona, according to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.