Armadillo Hunting (Long Story) Part I

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Armadillo Hunting (Long Story) Part I

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Armadillo Hunting (Long Story) Part I - 5/12/2008 1:48:06 PM

PoorBoy

Posts: 1142
Joined: 3/12/2007
From: Palm Coast, FL
Status: offline

Well, this is a long story.

It begins with having done everything humanly and humanely possible to eradicate one or more armadillos from destroying our front and side yard. Thus far, it has been a nine day struggle, or should I say, 9-night endeavor. Approximately four thousand square feet of our yard looks more like lunar landscape.

With the exception of using antifreeze, I’ll explain later, we followed all posted words of wisdom from website research and local lawn and garden experts. Most advice has been along the lines of armadillos being God’s little creatures and further reveals that no one has a foolproof method to invite the critters to feed elsewhere. The common sense approach has been to remove the food source and thus motivate the animals to hunt elsewhere.

Removing the food source requires a PhD in subterranean creatures. Getting past the first three species, being a variety of worms, grubs, and ground crickets, necessitates a full command of the Latin language. Most names are spelled out longer than the actual size of the insect themselves. There is hardly a vowel to be found in any name and the various dependencies which exist on soil temperature, composition, larva stages, and their habitat in general, has you reaching for hand-grenades instead of sprays and granular spreads. I don’t think I’ll ever walk barefoot in the grass again. Seeing close-up photographs of some of these dirt-dwellers can formulate bad dreams for a month. Stephen Spielberg doesn’t have much imagination after all. He should look at some of these beasts up close before creating his next monster. All of these insects are apparently yum-yum for armadillo on their nocturnal quest for nourishment.

After investing a small fortune in numerous lawn additives with active ingredients that were named by the guy who came up with the bug names, I diligently applied multiple chemicals at probably twice the recommended dosage level that will most likely have our homestead listed as one of the EPA’s wastelands. In the right light, at night, our lawn has a pleasant yellow glow now. The combined smell that our yard emits should be enough all by itself to keep everything and everyone away, including the mailman. Following the advice from a varmint website, I additionally and liberally dispensed two big boxes of mothballs all over the place. We are getting use to donning our gas masks now to and from the cars in the driveway. Believe it or not, after all these multiple lawn applications, we still get visited each night by this (these) armadillo.

At this point I must assume that we have multiple grazers because I cannot believe that this much nightly destruction can be accomplished by one armadillo. Daily, it takes me three or four hours to re-tamp big wads of turf and stomp-down on hundreds of claw and nose holes. Did I mention his burrow yet?

Conveniently located right next to our front door has been a reoccurring 9-inch diameter burrow than goes straight down a foot or so and then makes a nice bend under our concrete foundation. I think this resident even put up his own mailbox the other night. Each day, I pour a 2 gallon bottle of antifreeze into the hole and then cover it up again. After the third time of covering up his den, this animal is currently living elsewhere and the burrow hasn’t been re-dug.

Yesterday I bought a gun. Yes, it has come to that. We are about mid-way through my own version of the movie Caddy Shack. Nightly patrols, thus far, have failed to reveal a face to face confrontation, so I am not quite sure why I think toting a gun will make the creature appear. But if he does appear, I’m going to make my day. And, I have a plan.

Gun ownership is not new to me, but until now, I didn’t have the right firearm for the task at hand; necessitating a grenade launcher. Just kidding. Deer riffles, .357 Magnum & 38 Specials, and a 12 gauge sh