06/21/2026
We have ringtails in Mill Creek Canyon. Interesting info!
In 2008, researchers on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in northwestern California trapped twenty-four ringtails in temperate rainforest. They fitted sixteen of them with radio collars and tracked them to 140 different sleeping sites across the reservation over the following eight months. The ringtails were not living in rock crevices or mine shafts. They were sleeping in tree cavities fifty feet up in old-growth Douglas-firs and black oaks, in a forest that gets sixty inches of rain per year and looks nothing like a canyon in Texas.
The Hoopa Valley Reservation sits northeast of Eureka in the mountains of the Klamath-Trinity region. The landscape is steep, wet, densely forested, and as far from the Sonoran Desert as you can get while staying in ringtail range. The fact that ringtails live there at all is not widely known. The fact that someone collared sixteen of them and tracked where they sleep every day is the kind of data that barely existed for this species before this study was published.
Sean Matthews, a wildlife ecologist at Oregon State University's Institute for Natural Resources, co-authored the study and explained the problem. There are so many unknowns about fundamental aspects of their ecology, he said. Gaps in what we know about their life history traits, habitat preferences, species interactions, and population-level threats inhibit effective population monitoring, habitat management, and conservation planning. In plain language, the ringtail is one of the least-studied carnivores in North America, and the reason is simple. It is strictly nocturnal, weighs two pounds, moves through the canopy and the understory in total darkness, rotates through dozens of sleeping sites so it never stays in one place long enough to pattern, and vanishes at the first hint of human presence. Studying it requires thousands of trap nights just to catch enough animals to collar.
The Hoopa team used 2,466 trap nights to catch twenty-four ringtails. That is roughly a hundred nights of effort per animal captured. Sixteen were fitted with VHF radio collars small enough for a two-pound carnivore and tracked to their daytime sleeping sites on 431 occasions. The researchers walked in on the radio signal each day, located the tree, and recorded the species, diameter, cavity height, canopy cover, slope, distance to water, and forest stand type. They did this over and over until they had a dataset large enough to tell them what a ringtail actually selects when it has an entire forested mountain landscape to choose from.
The answer surprised the desert expectation. Ringtails on the Hoopa reservation selected cavities in mature and older forest over every other habitat type. Nearly half of all unique rest sites were in cavities in live trees. Black oaks were the most common species for unique sites. Douglas-firs were the most revisited, with one ringtail returning to the same Douglas-fir cavity twenty-two separate times. The animals were not using the youngest stands or the open oak woodland. They were selecting the biggest, oldest trees with the deepest cavities, the kind of structure that only exists in forest that has been standing for decades or longer.
They were also avoiding fishers. The Hoopa reservation supports a population of fishers, the ringtail's larger, heavier, more aggressive cousin in the mustelid-adjacent carnivore community. We covered fishers extensively on this page. A fisher encountering a ringtail in a shared tree cavity would kill it. The Hoopa data showed ringtails selected rest sites in areas with lower fisher activity, which suggests the two-pound animal is reading the landscape for the presence of the four-to-twelve-pound animal that would eat it and choosing sleeping locations accordingly. The ringtail does not compete with the fisher. It avoids it, the same way it avoids everything else, by never being predictable and never being in the same place twice unless the place is safe enough to return to twenty-two times.
The study was a collaboration between Oregon State University, Humboldt State University, and the Hoopa Valley Tribe. The tribe manages timber as a major economic driver on the reservation and wanted to understand which forest structures needed to be conserved during logging operations to maintain ringtail habitat. The answer from the data was clear. Old trees with cavities. Leave enough of them standing and the ringtails keep their sleeping sites. Cut them all and a two-pound nocturnal carnivore that most biologists have never seen in the field loses the only daytime refuge it has in a forest full of things that want to eat it.
A ringtail wearing a radio collar in a temperate rainforest on a tribal reservation in northern California is not the animal you thought it was when you read the first two ringtail posts on this page. It is the same species. Same oversized eyes, same banded tail, same two-pound body, same strictly nocturnal schedule. It just lives in a place where it rains five feet per year and the sleeping quarters are Douglas-fir cavities instead of limestone crevices, because the ringtail is not a desert animal. It is a cavity animal, and cavities exist in forests too.
In fact the range is still moving. A 2026 study published in Ecology and Evolution reported trail camera detections of ringtails in southern Idaho on February 17, 2023, two cameras capturing them only hours apart. Public sightings in southern Idaho had been increasing since the early 2000s, but the 2023 cameras were the first verified documentation. A two-pound nocturnal carnivore from the desert Southwest is now showing up in Idaho in February, in winter, in country that nobody mapped as ringtail habitat a generation ago.
Source: Gundermann et al. (2023). Northwest Science 96(3-4). / Oregon State University / OPB / Ecology and Evolution
