The Guardian: “In the pitch dark, Jason Bullard adroitly shoulders his rifle and levels it at the object. ‘That looks like one!’ he mutters. It turns out to be a fuse box. Another candidate, again aimed at with the gun, reveals itself as a rock. In this town besieged by armadillos, anything with a passing similarity to the armored nemesis is under suspicion. Bullard, an affable man in a camouflaged shirt, with a sonorous voice and prodigious beard, has rapidly gone from never seeing an armadillo in his bucolic corner of western North Carolina to killing 15 of them last year. In just the last two weeks, he has dispatched eight of the animals. Homeowners, perturbed at their lawns being torn up by the newly arrived mammals, handing him $100 for every dead carcass he produced.”

“But armadillos have wreaked such horticultural havoc that dozens of people in and around Sapphire, North Carolina, now have Bullard on a retainer, allowing him to prowl around their properties at night, armed, in the hope of shooting the culprits. The task has been learned hastily on the job. The standard .22 rifles Bullard used on the first armadillos didn’t seem to kill them outright. One of the creatures bounded away in a freakish, kangaroo-like hop, leaving an astonished Bullard flailing. The armadillos give off a sort of loamy grey color at night, a shone light absorbed by their bodies, rather than reflected in their eyes. ‘It’s like hunting aliens,’ said Bullard, who is more used to hunting feral pigs. ‘We know nothing about them. We can’t seem to kill them easily. They show up unexpectedly. And their numbers have just exploded.'”