Armadillos Everywhere All At Once

Get to know your new, heavily armored neighbors before they give you the skin-wasting disease formerly known as leprosy.

FOR THOSE WHO WORRY that loss of habitat, climate change, and Ginni Thomas are causing new waves of extinction, I have glad tidings: Armadillos are doing just fine. In fact, since crossing the Rio Grande in the 1850s, they’ve been expanding their territory steadily northward in the U.S., reaching all the way to Tennessee and North Carolina in the 1990s. Now they have been spotted in Virginia, where many of them voted in the most recent presidential election.

I know this (except that last bit, which I feel in my gut) because of a recent article in the National Geographic, about the 12-pound mammal’s wandering ways. It inspired me to do some digging, just like the ditch-dwelling armadillos do at night, before they conk out for a full sixteen hours.

There’s so much to admire in that.

And there’s more to love about armadillos, including…

Armadillos are the Michael Phelpses of armor-plated ditch sleepers. Not only are they g…