The Wild Armadillos of Illinois

Armadillos of Illinois


The armadillo, that official small mammal of Texas, is waddling its way north ?- maybe the grass really is greener there
By JEANNIE KEVERCopyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
The official small mammal of Texas is becoming a Yankee.
Blame global warming. Or maybe just wanderlust.
Texans feel proprietary about the armored mammal, but we hardly have a monopoly on its range. It's not even a native.
The nine-banded armadillo, the most prolific of the 20 species of armadillo and the only one to live in the United States, crossed the Rio Grande about 150 years ago.
In recent years, though, it has been spotted as far north as Illinois.
"I don't know exactly how they get here," said Joyce Hofmann, a research scientist with the Illinois Natural History Survey's center for wildlife and plant ecology. "I don't know if they're really surviving and breeding here."
But she has gathered more than 100 reports of sightings ?- mostly roadkill ?- since 1999.
A few have been found as far north as Chicago, but most have been in southern Illinois.
Emboldened by the disappearance of its predators, the 'dillo spread first across the Southeast and now is marching through the Midwest, where the biggest threat isn't bobcats and foxes but freezing weather.
"You don't see the individual (armadillo) up there looking for an overcoat," said Duane Schlitter, program leader for nongame species and rare and endangered species at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Mainly, you see them with frostbite. Or dead. But if their offspring survive, the species will have gained another outpost.
"During periods of warm winters, they'll disperse north during the summers and won't die off in the winter, so the next summer, they'll disperse a little further," Schlitter said.
Scientists say the movement is interesting but no big surprise.
"Things are always kind of fluid," Hofmann said. "We've had a couple of wolves show up lately. And mountain lions."
Still, she admitted, "for a smallish animal, it's really moved a long way."
How it got there on its own remains something of a mystery.
"You know how people are," Hofmann said. "They pick (animals) up and then think better of it and let them go. But when you get over 100 records, I don't think that's the whole story."
She and other researchers say it's too soon to tell if climate change is behind the movement, but it's possible.
"We don't seem to get as much snow as we used to," Hofmann said. Average winter temperatures in southern Illinois have been in the upper 20s, she said.
And the armadillo's traveling days might not be over.
A 1996 article in the Journal of Biogeography suggested the nine-banded armadillo could settle from Nebraska to New York and on to Cape Cod. With human help, it could even go west, stretching from California into parts of Canada.
Its range currently ends before Big Bend in far West Texas. It's not the climate that discourages them so much as the dirt.
"They burrow and they root for their food," said Doug Steen of Texas A&M University's Wildlife Services, who often mediates conflicts between people and armadillos. "As you get further west, the soil types change, and it's not as easy to dig."
They prefer well-watered lawns and flower beds, places where the burrowing is easy and insects plentiful.
People consider armadillos a nuisance, but Steen says they do have some benefits. "They aerate the soil," he said. "But when that happens to be in the middle of your St. Augustine lawn or in the middle of your high-dollar landscaped flowerbeds, they lose their cuddliness."