Armadillos Now Making Themselves At Home In Illinois & Nebraska - ENN

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MURPHYSBORO, Ill. — For years, Lloyd Nelson laughed off as myth reports that armadillos -- those armored, football-sized critters with the big claws and bigger nose -- had waddled their way into southern Illinois, the same place folks say they've seen cougars. Folks weren't fibbing about the mountain lions. Nelson knows now they weren't joshing about armadillos, either.

Since his run-in with an armadillo that was turning a woman's flower bed into a crater near here three years ago, the Jackson County animal-control chief says he's logged in this county alone 13 sightings of the stubby-legged kin to sloths and anteaters. Most were dead as doornails along roads -- the leathery animals with poor vision are no match against highway traffic. "We've had armadillos killed on the road just about every year" since 2003, says Nelson, reflecting what wildlife specialists say is ample evidence that the creatures with the pencil-thin tail are nudging their way northward from their southern U.S. climes.

"We've got them in Nebraska; that's as far north as we have any records," said Lynn Robbins, a biology professor at Missouri State University. "They're adapting, filling in so many places." To Robbins, the prehistoric-looking armadillo -- Spanish for "little armored thing" -- is here to stay. Exactly how many of Texas' official state mammal have made their way into the Midwest remains elusive. But observers say the remarkable advance may have been aided by the region's lack of predators and the abundance of favorable habitat such as forests and river valleys.

Milder winters packing less long-standing snow and ice -- the bane of armadillos who have little body fat, don't hibernate and rely on their noses to root out beetles, grubs and earthworms -- hasn't hurt, either. "All the evidence, the sightings and the number of roadkill would indicate that their numbers are increasing," said Clay Nielsen, a wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. In Illinois in recent years, "there's been quite a spurt in sightings."

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http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=11916

[NNadir]

1. I wonder when they'll show up in Canada.

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2. Next week, at the rate things seem to be going . ..

:banghead: