He probably isn't the first or last 'Dillo to visit you, he was most likely looking for grubs or ants etc. They are persistent creatures. I find them fascinating but they really can tear up a garden. Just try to shore up the fence the best you can to discourage his digging, and share some tomatoes with your neighbors! :O)

I don't know of any legal form of poison that you can use to rid your yard of the armadillos. Armadillos are there because there's some sort of living critters in the soil that they like to eat. Normally they are after the white grub worms in the soil, so treating the yard at the right time of the year to kill the grubs will reduce the available food supply. I used Milky Spore Powder scattered on the ground and watered in during the month of either July or August in our early years here and it really reduced the grub population which made our yard less attractive to armadillos. However, in the absence of grubs, the armadillos just dig and eat other soil-dwellers, including earthworms, so you'll never be able to completely rid your soil of things the armadillos like to eat. Cayenne pepper works for me if I scatter it right on the soil surface in areas where they are digging, but I generally don't use it because we are on rural acreage and the wild animals have to eat to survive. I try to coexist with them as much as possible because there's no way you'll ever get rid of all of them. Nature abhors a vacuum, so when you eliminate the dillos you have, more of them just move in from elsewhere. That's how nature works. We have fenced the digging dillos out of our veggie gardens, and I grow fruit, flowers and herbs in the veggie gardens along with the veggies since that's the only armadillo-proof area that I have. If I had armadillos under my house, I'd go to Sam's Club, CostCo or to an ethnic, oriental-type grocery store, and buy the huge bulk containers of hot pepper that they sell and I'd sprinkle it on the ground where the armadillos are burrowing under the house, and I'd sprinkle it wherever they were feeding. They don't like getting a snout full of hot, cayenne pepper and usually will move along elsewhere after experiencing that a few times. You will have to sprinkle more cayenne on the ground after each rainfall. The Dirt Doctor always has been a big proponent of repelling them with cayenne, so I'll link a page from his website where he discusses using this method to repel the armadillos. If you kill them and they are under your house, you will have to put up with the smell of their decomposing bodies for however long it takes the soft tissue to fully decompose. It will not be pleasant to smell that. The smell won't ruin the neighborhood forever, but it might make living in your house really unpleasant for several weeks. If you're able to drive them out from under the house by using the cayenne pepper, I'd suggest you lay down chicken wire several feet wide to completely cover the area where they were going under the house, and use boards to hold it down. This will exclude them if they should forget about the misery of the cayenne pepper and try to return in a few weeks or months. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Dirt Doctor: Armadillos and Cayenne Pepper

I've never trapped any but other rehabbers have trapped them and brought them to me. I believe the way they did it, was put up a barrier than lead them to the trap. I have released several on my property and last year, I raised two batches of babies, five in all. This is a picture of Henry and Edsel just prior to being released in my yard. I do live on 50 acres, but I probably have as many flower beds as anyone here, and I have never found them to be a particular problem. The only problem I had with them was they could suck down about a dozen night crawlers per feeding, and since I couldn't raise enough to keep up, it got a little expensive feeding them.

LoneJack, Oh, the more chickens the merrier. When you have fresh eggs to give away, you discover you have a whole more friends than you ever knew you had. Well, we are on rural acreage, so the more the merrier for us. I doubt that would apply to someone on a standard city-sized lot. Armadillos either are adapting more to the cold or the warmer winters are letting them make their way slowly north. I like armadillos as long as they aren't digging up the yard. When the dogs chase them across the creek, the armadillos just walk straight across the creek underwater. It is one of the more bizarre things you'll ever see. I'd rather see an armadillo walking across the yard than a skunk if I have a choice. Stockergal, We have horned toads here, but not in great profusion. I most often see them near the red harvester ant beds, and I believe they eat the harvester ants. When we were kids, we would catch them in the yard and play with them. They weren't considered endangered back then. I think it is the fire ants that are running the horned toads out of some areas, which is sad. I don't know how far north the fire ants have made it now, but when we moved from TX to OK, we were hoping that we had moved north of fire ant country. Nope. They were already here when we arrived in 1999. Kim, I should hire them out as grasshopper control. It is getting hot and the fields are drying out and grasshoppers are flooding into the civilized areas kept green by irrigation. I expect the chickens will be busy, busy for the next few weeks based on how many grasshoppers I've seen today. Dawn