woody116
Senior Member
Just read this in this mornings Chicago Tribune.
Why did the armadillo cross the Mississippi?
To get to Illinois.
By Ted Gregory
Tribune staff reporter
Published March 18, 2005
In their 55 million years, armadillos have rooted their way into peculiar nooks and crannies of culture.
Their notoriety as roadkill has spawned dozens of jokes: Why did the chicken cross the road? To show the armadillo it could be done.
But now armadillos--a.k.a. Texas speed bumps--are occupying a new place: Illinois.
A survey recently published in the winter edition of Illinois Natural History Survey Reports recorded 80 sightings of armadillos in recent years, primarily in 22 counties in the southwestern corner of the state.
"I've got three in the freezer right now," said Joyce Hofmann, a research scientist and mammologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey who conducted the count, "and one of these days I'll have to look at them again just to learn a little bit more about them. They can get pretty squished up sometimes. You'd think with all that armor, they'd hold up pretty well. But, oh, no, they don't."
Armadillos have managed to hold up well enough to make their way across the Mississippi River from southeast Missouri, where they have been residing for a decade or two.
They may have waddled along the bike lane on the Mississippi River bridge at Alton or island-hopped across the river. They may have stowed away on barges, railroad cars and trucks.
They've also been reported as far north as Terry and Cindy Bronke's back yard in Bloomingdale.
"My wife was laughing at me," Terry Bronke recalled of the summer morning last year when he sat sipping coffee on his deck and saw an armadillo toddle across his back yard.
"She thought it was a possum. She said I was nuts and I said, `Dear, I've seen armadillos. I know what they look like. That wasn't a possum. That was an armadillo."
The fact that armadillos, a native South American mammal that migrated into Central America across the Panamanian land bridge 3 million years ago, have ventured this far north may seem inconceivable or, at least, astonishing.
But the Illinois arrival of the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus), a nocturnal mammal about the size of a large housecat, makes sense. Their needs are simple.
Armadillos can survive where they find an abundant source of water and where the average January temperature is above 28 degrees. Rivers, creeks, ponds and lakes are abundant in southern Illinois, where the average winter temperature ranges from 32 to 36 degrees.
And, armadillos have been marching north and east on their clawed feet since first being documented in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas in 1849. That migration has been aided in large part by the transformation of forests to farm fields and yards, which drove out armadillo predators and created near ideal foraging conditions for the hard-shelled mammals.
About a hundred years after it was recorded in Texas, the armadillo was inhabiting all of Louisiana, where they are known as "possums on the half shell," and the southern sections of Oklahoma and Arkansas. Less than two decades later--helped in part by a pair that escaped from a private zoo in Brevard County, Fla., in 1922 and another escape that reportedly occurred in 1936 when a circus truck overturned near Titusville, Fla.--two waves of armadillos met in Alabama and continued to move.
By the 1970s, armadillos were digging up and munching on beetles, termites and caterpillars and nibbling on carrion in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Colorado, Kansas and Tennessee. The mammals' territory expanded in those states and moved into southern South Carolina by 1995, when some had been spotted as far north as Nebraska.
Most important for Illinois, armadillos also began establishing themselves in southern Missouri about that time. Once there, it was only a matter of time before they crossed the Mississippi and set up dens in southern Illinois.
The first of them made their way, posthumously, to Hofmann in September 2002, when her colleague, DNR restoration ecologist Terry Esker, brought an armadillo that had met its fate, as have countless of its relatives, on a road. This road was in Franklin County, in deep southern Illinois.
To determine whether the Franklin County armadillo was an aberration, she obtained a $1,000 grant from the Illinois Wildlife Preservation Fund and, in July 2003, surveyed 135 people, including DNR wildlife biologists, foresters, conservation police, nature preserve field staff, and county and municipal animal control officers.
Sixty-five percent of those surveyed responded, and 21 percent of the respondents said they knew of armadillo sightings. And the sightings have continued to trickle in.
At last count, Hofmann said she has received 80 sightings from about 60 people. About 76 sightings occurred in the southwestern quarter of the state, and virtually all of the animals have been seen since 1999, Hofmann said. Most have been roadkills.
There's a reasonable explanation. Armadillos find carrion along or on roads. Not the brightest mammal and hampered by terrible eyesight, armadillos do not rattle easily.
But, when they are surprised, they jump, sometimes as high as 3 feet in the air--a reaction meant to scare or startle predators. It often yields fatal results when the animal encounters a car or truck on the road.
"That sort of response works well if the armadillo is looking at a cougar," said Joshua Nixon, a PhD biology student at Michigan State University who has run an exhaustive armadillo Web site for a decade. "It doesn't work so well if it's looking at a Dodge Ram."
The armadillo is vulnerable in other areas, as well. They are used in medical research, particularly in leprosy, because their body temperature is low and their immune system is weak.
In fact, experts say they can be carriers of leprosy, although about the only way for a human to get the sickness from an armadillo is by consuming the animal raw.
Still, the critters have survived and surfaced in some unexpected places that are not geographical.
In the Depression, when economically distressed people cooked and ate armadillos--they reportedly taste like pork--armadillos got the nickname Hoover Hogs, a jab at then-President Herbert Hoover's promise to put a chicken in every pot.
More recently, armadillos were on display at the Texas State Society's "Black Tie and Boots Ball," on Jan. 20 in Washington, D.C., to celebrate President Bush's second inauguration.
Northwestern University has its Armadillo Day, an all-day Saturday party in May, started by students from Texas in 1972.
And, in Bolivia, armadillo shells are used to make the charango, a 10-string guitar-like instrument.
Beyond that, armadillos possess some rather curious physiological abilities. Armadillos can smell food 20 centimeters below the surface. Females give birth to identical quadruplets.
They can hold their breath for up to six minutes, which allows them to walk along river and lake bottoms. If an armadillo needs to swim, it can swallow air deep into its intestines for buoyancy. Those aquatic skills may explain in part how they found their way to Illinois.
That is just one of the questions Hofmann is trying to answer. First she needs to find an armadillo that doesn't look like a flattened football sprouting a tail. She has made two trips to southern Illinois in attempts to find an armadillo, dead or alive. Both expeditions have been fruitless.
Undaunted, Hoffman is planning another armadillo reconnaissance mission in April. She is hopeful, but realistic.
"It'd be nice to find a live one," she said.
Why did the armadillo cross the Mississippi?
To get to Illinois.
By Ted Gregory
Tribune staff reporter
Published March 18, 2005
In their 55 million years, armadillos have rooted their way into peculiar nooks and crannies of culture.
Their notoriety as roadkill has spawned dozens of jokes: Why did the chicken cross the road? To show the armadillo it could be done.
But now armadillos--a.k.a. Texas speed bumps--are occupying a new place: Illinois.
A survey recently published in the winter edition of Illinois Natural History Survey Reports recorded 80 sightings of armadillos in recent years, primarily in 22 counties in the southwestern corner of the state.
"I've got three in the freezer right now," said Joyce Hofmann, a research scientist and mammologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey who conducted the count, "and one of these days I'll have to look at them again just to learn a little bit more about them. They can get pretty squished up sometimes. You'd think with all that armor, they'd hold up pretty well. But, oh, no, they don't."
Armadillos have managed to hold up well enough to make their way across the Mississippi River from southeast Missouri, where they have been residing for a decade or two.
They may have waddled along the bike lane on the Mississippi River bridge at Alton or island-hopped across the river. They may have stowed away on barges, railroad cars and trucks.
They've also been reported as far north as Terry and Cindy Bronke's back yard in Bloomingdale.
"My wife was laughing at me," Terry Bronke recalled of the summer morning last year when he sat sipping coffee on his deck and saw an armadillo toddle across his back yard.
"She thought it was a possum. She said I was nuts and I said, `Dear, I've seen armadillos. I know what they look like. That wasn't a possum. That was an armadillo."
The fact that armadillos, a native South American mammal that migrated into Central America across the Panamanian land bridge 3 million years ago, have ventured this far north may seem inconceivable or, at least, astonishing.
But the Illinois arrival of the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus), a nocturnal mammal about the size of a large housecat, makes sense. Their needs are simple.
Armadillos can survive where they find an abundant source of water and where the average January temperature is above 28 degrees. Rivers, creeks, ponds and lakes are abundant in southern Illinois, where the average winter temperature ranges from 32 to 36 degrees.
And, armadillos have been marching north and east on their clawed feet since first being documented in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas in 1849. That migration has been aided in large part by the transformation of forests to farm fields and yards, which drove out armadillo predators and created near ideal foraging conditions for the hard-shelled mammals.
About a hundred years after it was recorded in Texas, the armadillo was inhabiting all of Louisiana, where they are known as "possums on the half shell," and the southern sections of Oklahoma and Arkansas. Less than two decades later--helped in part by a pair that escaped from a private zoo in Brevard County, Fla., in 1922 and another escape that reportedly occurred in 1936 when a circus truck overturned near Titusville, Fla.--two waves of armadillos met in Alabama and continued to move.
By the 1970s, armadillos were digging up and munching on beetles, termites and caterpillars and nibbling on carrion in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Colorado, Kansas and Tennessee. The mammals' territory expanded in those states and moved into southern South Carolina by 1995, when some had been spotted as far north as Nebraska.
Most important for Illinois, armadillos also began establishing themselves in southern Missouri about that time. Once there, it was only a matter of time before they crossed the Mississippi and set up dens in southern Illinois.
The first of them made their way, posthumously, to Hofmann in September 2002, when her colleague, DNR restoration ecologist Terry Esker, brought an armadillo that had met its fate, as have countless of its relatives, on a road. This road was in Franklin County, in deep southern Illinois.
To determine whether the Franklin County armadillo was an aberration, she obtained a $1,000 grant from the Illinois Wildlife Preservation Fund and, in July 2003, surveyed 135 people, including DNR wildlife biologists, foresters, conservation police, nature preserve field staff, and county and municipal animal control officers.
Sixty-five percent of those surveyed responded, and 21 percent of the respondents said they knew of armadillo sightings. And the sightings have continued to trickle in.
At last count, Hofmann said she has received 80 sightings from about 60 people. About 76 sightings occurred in the southwestern quarter of the state, and virtually all of the animals have been seen since 1999, Hofmann said. Most have been roadkills.
There's a reasonable explanation. Armadillos find carrion along or on roads. Not the brightest mammal and hampered by terrible eyesight, armadillos do not rattle easily.
But, when they are surprised, they jump, sometimes as high as 3 feet in the air--a reaction meant to scare or startle predators. It often yields fatal results when the animal encounters a car or truck on the road.
"That sort of response works well if the armadillo is looking at a cougar," said Joshua Nixon, a PhD biology student at Michigan State University who has run an exhaustive armadillo Web site for a decade. "It doesn't work so well if it's looking at a Dodge Ram."
The armadillo is vulnerable in other areas, as well. They are used in medical research, particularly in leprosy, because their body temperature is low and their immune system is weak.
In fact, experts say they can be carriers of leprosy, although about the only way for a human to get the sickness from an armadillo is by consuming the animal raw.
Still, the critters have survived and surfaced in some unexpected places that are not geographical.
In the Depression, when economically distressed people cooked and ate armadillos--they reportedly taste like pork--armadillos got the nickname Hoover Hogs, a jab at then-President Herbert Hoover's promise to put a chicken in every pot.
More recently, armadillos were on display at the Texas State Society's "Black Tie and Boots Ball," on Jan. 20 in Washington, D.C., to celebrate President Bush's second inauguration.
Northwestern University has its Armadillo Day, an all-day Saturday party in May, started by students from Texas in 1972.
And, in Bolivia, armadillo shells are used to make the charango, a 10-string guitar-like instrument.
Beyond that, armadillos possess some rather curious physiological abilities. Armadillos can smell food 20 centimeters below the surface. Females give birth to identical quadruplets.
They can hold their breath for up to six minutes, which allows them to walk along river and lake bottoms. If an armadillo needs to swim, it can swallow air deep into its intestines for buoyancy. Those aquatic skills may explain in part how they found their way to Illinois.
That is just one of the questions Hofmann is trying to answer. First she needs to find an armadillo that doesn't look like a flattened football sprouting a tail. She has made two trips to southern Illinois in attempts to find an armadillo, dead or alive. Both expeditions have been fruitless.
Undaunted, Hoffman is planning another armadillo reconnaissance mission in April. She is hopeful, but realistic.
"It'd be nice to find a live one," she said.
