Horsin' around
Monday, September 8, 2008
A FEW YEARS AGO, we were spending a little vacation time in Texas. There were commercials on local television there advertising one of the Texas beers (which are actually pretty good). The basic theme of these ads was the idea of a giant armadillo who has a craving for the sponsor’s product.
There were camera shots of damaged beer trucks or storage facilities and the announcement of missing kegs. We never really SAW anything but maybe a glimpse of a huge scaly tail as the culprit quietly slipped away. It was a regional inside joke.
I was reminded of that recently when a reader called to tell me an armadillo story. His job requires a lot of travel in the south central part of Kansas. He said that for the past couple of years, he’s been seeing more and more armadillos, usually as road kills. (Fortunately, not the giant beer-guzzling type, I gather).
A word about “what is an armadillo,” first. This is a small mammal, a quiet, insect-eating individual about the size of a cat. It wears a hard shell with overlapping plates like a knight’s armor. Its name, in fact, means something like “little armored one” in Spanish. Somebody once quipped that a porcupine is a possum with a really bad hair day. By that definition, an armadillo is an armored possum.
These creatures are very common across Texas and the southwest. They’re pretty harmless, but are a nuisance because they dig up lawns looking for grubs and worms, or just to dig a burrow, a place to live.
They have an odd reflex that is used for defense. When they’re startled, a powerful muscle spasm causes them to leap into the air. Straight up, two or three feet. They come down rolling into a ball with soft parts protected and nothing but armor showing.
While this works pretty well against coyotes and other traditional enemies, it’s not very effective when the threat is from an approaching car, truck or train. They move around mostly at night and it’s common to see road-kills directly in the traffic lane. Jumping straight up under a truck chassis isn’t a very effective move.
Now about armadillos in central Kansas? Yes, I think so. Nearly 20 years ago we saw one near Independence, Kansas. It was about dusk and we were driving on a blacktop secondary road. There in the ditch was an armadillo. I couldn’t believe it, so we went back for a second look. The animal wasn’t perturbed at all. We watched it for a while from a few feet away while it wandered along sniffing in the grass for insects.
What’s happening? I’ve said before, I think the climate is changing. My grandfather’s stories of Kansas prairie snows a century ago would surely indicate that. Even 50 years ago, most farms in this area had a horse-drawn sleigh or runners to fit on the wagon in place of wheels. They still turn up at old farm auctions. I can remember only one winter, though, about 1980, when that equipment could have been used.
The climate is changing, as it always has. The pendulum swings. It’s almost imperceptible, because the length of the cycle is a little longer than one human lifetime. There are warm periods and cooler periods, with tougher winters.
What we do notice is the almost imperceptible shift of the wildlife populations as they adapt to the change. We were once told that pheasants couldn’t reproduce east of Highway 81, but in the past few years they’re becoming common here. Beaver are back. House finches are becoming one of the most numerous birds around Emporia, though I never saw one here until a few years ago.
We’ll probably see some other species of wildlife that are unfamiliar as this shift continues. I saw a porcupine road-kill southwest of Wichita last spring, the first I ever saw in Kansas.
And, since I started writing on this month’s column, I had another phone call. Somebody had seen an armadillo just south of Olpe on Highway 99.
See you down the road.
Author and columnist Don Coldsmith lives in Emporia.
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Posted by create (anonymous) on September 8, 2008 at 3:49 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I have seen several armadillo road kills just a little north of Olpe over the past few years of traveling to and from that direction on Hwy 99 every day. They're heeeeerrrrre.
Posted by madpoet (anonymous) on September 9, 2008 at 9:33 a.m. (Suggest removal)
My father lives in Winfield. Several years ago he had an armadillo totally shred his yard. I've seen several dead armadillos on I-35 around Emporia. One even east of town right before the Road U exit. We call them "possom on a half-shell" in my family.
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