Judy Carver and her husband from Carbondale, a college town in Illinois, started noticing small holes in the grass and parts of their garden where the plants had been chewed since the beginning of spring this year, and they weren’t sure if it was deer or squirrels digging in their garden of shrubs and trees, located on the shore of a lake outside of town.
Then one evening this month when they went for a walk, they saw something in the bushes near their door. It was a creature “about the size of a three-pound sack of flour,” Judy said, with pointed ears, brown scaly armor, and a long tail.
The 67-year-old woman immediately knew it was an armadillo.
“Trust me, when you see one you’ll know what it is,” she said. According to Ms. Carver, the creature was as scared of them as they were curious about it. He froze – his head hiding in the bushes – while her husband shined a flashlight on him. “I think he thought we couldn’t see him, but we saw the whole body,” she said.
How did a small animal with a large armor get from southern Illinois?
These opossum-sized animals – nearly blind and looking like a cross between an anteater and a sack of potatoes – have been creeping north from Texas for several decades and in recent years have made their home in the land of Lincoln, destroying backyards, drawing confused looks and being killed on the highways, their bodies dumped on the sides of the road.
In areas of southern Illinois, there are a lot of them.
“how much do you want?” asked Jeff Holshauser, 57, an avid hunter who works in the air conditioning business in the small town of Anna, in the southwestern corner of the state. Holshauser said he has seen as many as 10 armadillos a night using optical imaging equipment while hunting jackals on farmers’ farms. He said he’s shot five in his yard in the past few months. “I see them everywhere.”
They have recently been spotted even further north, in Will County, five hours north and in the suburbs of Chicago, where the winters are often much harsher. Scientists say this is evidence both of the adaptation of these animals but also of the warming climate.
One big question: How did a small animal with short legs and a large armor cross the Mississippi River in the west or the Ohio River in the south, large rivers with strong currents, ship traffic and lots of debris.
“We don’t know that yet,” said Agustin Jimenez, an associate professor of zoology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Armadillos are surprisingly good swimmers, the professor said. Even a few individuals that crossed the rivers could breed quickly, because each armadillo egg splits into four identical embryos, he said.
Others suspect that they cross bridges at night or hitchhike in train cars or in the trunks of pickup trucks. “There’s a lot of speculation and some anecdotal reports either way,” said Stan McCatgart, director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources’ Livestock Diversity Program.
Not adapted to cold climates
Armadillos use their long snouts to sniff out insects that live close to the ground. These animals crossed from Mexico to Texas around 1850 and have since expanded their range northward, said Jimenez, who studied and sorted parasites that live on armadillos (the armadillo is one of the few animals that carries the bacteria that causes leprosy, though none of the armadillos tested in Illinois carried it, he said).
These mammals are not adapted to cold climates, due to the paucity of fur, a relatively low natural body temperature and a small amount of accumulated fat, Jimenez said. By continuing to expand into central Illinois and beyond, they are a clear signal that these areas are warming, Jimenez said.
Karen Schwacker, 40, who works in environmental sustainability, says she never saw armadillos when she was growing up in Carbondale but in recent years has come across many of their carcasses. One warm day in February, she was eating a snack in her kitchen while staring out the window and suddenly saw the first live armadillo she had seen in days. She grabbed her phone and ran outside to take pictures.
“He didn’t care that I was approaching and he kept digging at the roots and literally stuck his snout in the ground and dug,” she said.
Shawker, who wanted to go home to share the video with friends, doesn’t quite know how to welcome the new guests. “I’m not sure I’d say they’re ‘cute,'” she said. “These are strange-looking animals. I mean, they have such a strange snout and a kind of scaly skin that resembles a turtle. For me, it was mostly interesting and strange.”
“Why kill armadillos?”
After Judy Carver and her husband saw their first armadillo, they began to see more and more damage the animal was doing. One night, he dug 50 small holes in the garden, she said.
The second time they saw the armadillo, it spooked when her husband approached, she said. “He jumped in the air a little bit and whooped, he ran pretty fast” back into the forest.
As an animal lover who routinely feeds a turtle that comes to her back door, Carver said she enjoys the encounters with the armadillo, though her husband gets a little tired of cleaning the little craters in the garden.
She says a friend who moved to Texas a few years ago told her she often hears gunfire from neighbors shooting armadillos in their yards. “I told her, ‘Why kill armadillos?’ Now that I see all their digs, I’m not too surprised,” Carver said.
Carrie Evers, a neighbor down the street from Carver, saw an armadillo in her garden a few weeks ago while walking the dogs. “I think we scared him and he just went on his way along this row of bushes,” said Evers, a 58-year-old retired accountant, pointing to an area in her garden.
She has no plans to call an exterminator unless things get really bad, she said. One friend who is a serious gardener lost one, Evers said. “Rabbits, squirrels and armadillos are all enemies of the garden,” she said. “If armadillos ate squirrels, I think everyone would love them.”