Blame global warming. Or maybe just wanderlust. The official small mammal of Texas is moving north and could even make it into Canada.

The nine-banded armadillo, the most prolific of the 20 species of armadillo and the only one to live in the United States, crossed the Rio Grande about 150 years ago. In recent years, though, it has been spotted as far north as Illinois.

“I don’t know exactly how they get here,” says Joyce Hofmann, a research scientist with the Illinois Natural History Survey’s centre for wildlife and plant ecology.

Although Hofmann can’t say whether the armadillos are able to breed in the Illinois climate, she has gathered more than 100 reports of sightings — mostly roadkill — since 1999. “During periods of warm winters, they’ll disperse north during the summers and won’t die off in the winter, so the next summer, they’ll disperse a little farther,” says Duane Schlitter, program leader for non-game species and rare and endangered species at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Hofmann and other researchers say it’s too soon to tell if climate change is behind the movement, but it’s possible.

“We don’t seem to get as much snow as we used to,” Hofmann says. Average winter temperatures in southern Illinois have been in just a few degrees below freezing, she says.

Scientists say the movement is interesting but no big surprise. “Things are always kind of fluid,” Hofmann says. “We’ve had a couple of wolves show up lately. And mountain lions.”

Still, she concedes, “for a smallish animal, it’s really moved a long way.”

How the armadillo got there on its own remains something of a mystery. “You know how people are,” Hofmann says. “They pick (animals) up and then think better of it and let them go. But when you get over 100 records, I don’t think that’s the whole story.”

The nine-banded armadillo’s odyssey has been anticipated. A 1996 article in the Journal of Biogeography suggested it could go west as well as east and reach as far north as Canada. But, for now, its normal range is still in west Texas.

It’s not the climate that discourages them so much as the dirt.

“They burrow and they root for their food,” says Doug Steen of Texas A&M University’s Wildlife Services, who often mediates conflicts between people and armadillos. “As you get farther west, the soil types change, and it’s not as easy to dig.”

Armadillos prefer well-watered lawns and flower beds, places where the burrowing is easy and insects plentiful.

“They aerate the soil,” Steen says. “But when that happens to be in the middle of your…high-dollar landscaped flowerbeds, they lose their cuddliness.”

Houston Chronicle