Conservationist Arnaud Desbiez worked in the Brazilian Pantanal for eight years before he set eyes on a giant armadillo. On one level this is surprising: a giant armadillo is about the size of a pig. But it’s also rare, solitary and nocturnal, spending up to three-quarters of its life underground. The giant armadillo is considered a ghost species – you know they’re there, even if you can’t find any.
Narrated by David Attenborough, Hotel Armadillo: Natural World (BBC2) was first and foremost a detective story, a lesson in the judicious laying of camera traps. Giant armadillos reside in deep burrows, and they dig a new one every two days. If you find that your armadillo is not at home, chances are he ain’t coming back.
In the armadillo’s absence, however, the vacant burrow serves as a hotel for other creatures: porcupines, peccaries, foxes, ocelots, tapirs and other, smaller armadillos who forage for roots and bugs in the newly turned earth. A sort of anteater called a tamandua uses the ex-burrow as a nursery. All in all, 80 species have been recorded either dropping by or moving to the Hotel Armadillo, making the giant armadillo a pivotal component of a fragile ecosystem. “The battle to save the giant armadillo is the battle to save biodiversity,” said Desbiez. “It’s all the same.”
The footage, when they got it, was amazing. You might imagine that an armadillo the size of a pig suffers from a deficit of the cuddliness so vital to preserving species, but that’s because you’ve never seen a baby giant armadillo (not many people have until now, to be fair), which is as cute as a dinosaur in a kid’s cartoon – an armour-plated kitten.
As is the form these days, one had to wait until the final “how we did it” segment to discover just how thankless a task filming giant armadillos is. The comings and goings of 80 species exponentially increases the odds of something kicking your equipment over in the dead of night. But if you like the idea of being dangled by your ankles into an armadillo burrow that may or may not contain rats, a career in wildlife filming could be for you.
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