That strange critter crossing the road might not be a possum.
Dr. Timothy Gaudin had known for a while that armadillos were creeping into the western edges of the Southeast. In fact, in 2011 he and one of his students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga published a study confirming the existence of the odd-looking, armored mammals.
“Around that time, I think, the closest thing to a mountainous record would’ve been Big South Fork [Recreation Area of Tennessee and Kentucky],” Gaudin says. “Somebody contacted me about seeing an armadillo there.”
But it wasn’t until about two years ago that Gaudin, a professor of biology, geology and environmental science and an armadillo expert, started fielding calls from residents and visitors of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and other parts of the Blue Ridge.
“I started getting these reports from actually in the mountains, somebody who lives in Maggie Valley in western North Carolina at 3,000 feet elevation,” he says. “I just got one last week from somebody who was hiking up in the mountains in South Carolina and found one at about 2,000 feet elevation. And I got a report from Johnson City [Tennessee].”
Unlike some animals that can easily be mistaken for others—a wolf, for example, that turns out to be a coyote—armadillos are “pretty distinctive-looking,” says Gaudin. “They’re hard to mistake for anything else. So I don’t get a lot of false reports on them. Usually when people see them, they really see them.”
Not only are the prehistoric critters migrating here from Florida and the Southwest, they’re spreading faster than when they first began to appear in the Blue Ridge states in the 1980s.
“We’re expecting them to show up in more northerly places than we ever would have dreamed 10 years ago,” Gaudin says. “It’s their time.”
Did You Know?
• The armadillo is the only mammal with a shell.
• Armadillos rarely stray far from some type of waterway.
• They always give birth to identical quadruplets. “So if you see a small one, there are usually three others in the area that are palling around with it,” says Dr. Timothy Gaudin, professor of biology, geology and environmental science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Oddly, he says, “Nobody has ever seen them mating.”
Of the world’s 21 known armadillo species (most are from Central and South America), so far the nine-banded is the only one to show up in the Southeast. “At some level, the mountains are a good habitat for them,” Gaudin says, noting that armadillos feed mostly on insects in moist, soft soils. They also love blackberries and, because of their thick shells, can withstand the thorns.
In addition, says Gaudin, “We used to think that, because they’re not very well insulated compared to other mammals, they wouldn’t deal with the cold very well and that would keep them out of those areas. But it turns out that they are a lot less cold-sensitive than we once thought.”
Still, it’s hard to say where armadillos fit into the mountain ecosystem, Gaudin notes. They don’t compete with raccoons or possums and aren’t generally considered beneficial pest controllers.
“They seem to go after the nicest yards in the neighborhood [to dig],” he says, “because those are the best watered and they have the most insects.”
And then there’s that leprosy thing. Although no cases have been confirmed east of the Mississippi River, the armadillo is the only mammal in the Americas confirmed to carry the deadly disease.
For this reason, and because they’re so unpredictable, Gaudin advises people not to touch them.
“They don’t bite, but they do have a startle response,” he says. “So if you sneak up on them, they will jump straight up in the air about three to four feet. And they’re heavy enough that they break people’s noses and they knock teeth out.”
Generally, though, armadillos are harmless, he says. “Apart from digging up your yard, they’re really not threatening. They don’t get into garbage. But they are quite hard to get rid of. The easiest way is to just stop watering your lawn and hope for a dry summer.”
Want More?
The article above appears in our May/June 2019 issue. For more like it, subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you!