Field Guide: Nine-banded armadillo

In a very different way, the South is rising again

Credit: Jason Penney

Until recently, all I knew about armadillos was their unsuitability for the modern world. When frightened, an armadillo leaps up to four feet in the air. One of the things that frighten armadillos is cars roaring down highways. You can see the problem: Texas speedbumps, they’re sometimes called.

This is a weird little critter. Sometimes they’ll cross a river by clinging to the bed with their claws; sometimes they’ll fill their bellies with air and turn themselves into a raft to float across. A single armadillo egg produces four genetically identical offspring, a feat unique among vertebrates. There are many kinds of armadillo across South America, including a species that grows to more than a hundred pounds. (Sixty million years ago, one ancestral armadillo was as large as a rhinoceros.) But only one species of armadillo lives in the United States: the nine-banded armadillo, a relatively puny beast, topping out at 2.5 feet long and 17 pounds heavy.