This story is original featured in Watchman which is part of Climate office cooperation.
In complete darkness, Jason Pollard cleverly held his rifle and pointed it at the target. “This looks like one!” mumbled; It turned out to be a fuse box. Another candidate, aiming the gun again, reveals himself as a rock.
In this city besieged by armadillos, anything resembling a passing enemy armored vehicle is in doubt.
Pollard, a cute guy in a camouflage shirt with a fluffy voice and a great beard, quickly went from never seeing an armadillo on his country corner in western North Carolina to killing 15 of them last year. In the past two weeks alone, he has sent eight of the animals.
The homeowners, alarmed at their lawns being torn apart by the newly arrived mammals, initially commissioned Pollard as a sort of armadillo bounty hunter, handing him $100 for every dead carcass he produced. But armadillos have caused such havoc with gardening that dozens of people in and around Sapphire, North Carolina, now have a bollard on a spare, allowing it to roam around their property at night, armed, hoping to shoot the culprits.
The task was hastily learned in action. The standard .22 Pollard rifles used in First Armor don’t seem to quite kill them. He trapped one of the creatures in a strange kangaroo-like leap, leaving Pollard stunned. Armored people emit a kind of mud-gray color at night, emitting a bright light that is absorbed by their bodies, rather than being reflected in their eyes.
“It’s like hunting aliens,” said Pollard, who is more used to hunting feral boars. “We know nothing about them. It seems we can’t kill them easily. They appear unexpectedly. Their numbers have just exploded.”
to discover armadillos In North Carolina, at first, it was inappropriate. This mammal creature has been in Texas for more than two decades and was accustomed to the heat of baking in the dry, flat state. There, they are regularly seen as killing roads or in small scale racing events where they are made to blast off a 40-foot track.
Armadillo meat is consumed in Central America, and to a lesser extent in the United States, where it was called “poor pork” in Depression-era Texas, and has been contaminated due to the species’ association with leprosy.
Meanwhile, Sapphire lies 800 miles away and worlds in the towering Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s part of a scenic plateau that receives so much rainfall that it has developed a temperate rainforest, with land and rocks covered in lush moss amid towering fir and fir. In the fall, the area is a wonderful riot of autumn red and orange colors. The area even has a small ski resort.
When the armadillo was first seen here in 2019, Pollard got a call. “I just didn’t believe it,” he said. “I thought the woman had a possum and drinking problem.” But within a year, Pollard was spending his nights at the local golf course, speeding from hole to hole on a golf cart, killing armadillos on the greens like some kind of cross between Tiger Woods and Davy Crockett.
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