Drive on any major highway in Kansas and you’ll likely see some roadkill.
For decades, biologists at the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism have found a treasure trove in their counts of flattened animals. It’s a way to create a population index of raccoons and beavers.
In 1986, the scientists also started counting armadillos.
“The first year, the total number of armadillo reports, actually the first couple of years, it was two total,” state furbearer biologist Matt Peek said.
While armadillos have been spotted in Kansas as early as the 1940s, they were rare.
That all changed in mid-2000. Climate change is a likely part of the explanation.
The effects of climate change appear all over the world. As average temperatures rise and droughts drag on longer in Kansas, plants, animals, and even humans are beginning to adapt.
The subtle changes let armadillos claw their way farther North and push some Kansas farmers to try alternative crops, such as cotton, to cope with the decline of available water.
In a graph that tracks how many armadillos are spotted for every thousand miles driven, the number stays below 1 until about 2000. Then a sudden spike appears.
Curiously, there’s an equally dramatic drop around 2006. What happened?
“They were getting so many,” he said, “they just quit keeping track.”
Armadillos’ main source of food is bugs they find in the ground. They don’t hibernate and can only go about two weeks without eating food.
That becomes a problem in places with extended freezes and snow-covered ground, which is why finding so many in Kansas perplexes biologists.
“We just don’t know how they’re surviving these cold winters when they have such limited food,” Kansas State Extension Specialist Jeri Geren said.
Part of it could be that as average temperatures rise, due in part to heat-trapping pollution released from fossil fuels, the duration of consecutive days below freezing shrinks.
