ARMADILLOS OF THE PAMPAS 
nose to the root of its rather long tail. It has tremendously 
powerful claws, and is reputed to dig up corpses, but in fact 
lives mainly on ants and termites. Its armor looks like a uni- 
form coat of mail, but really is disposed in five belts. 
Nearly as large, and more extended in its range 
toward the south, is the tatouay, with a short, nearly naked 
tail and twelve or thirteen bands of plates. To the south of 
this, all over Paraguay and Argentina, are found several other 
much smaller species, as the peludo, of which Hudson * has 
written at such length. It lives on the pampas, where in some 
places its burrows are so numerous as to make riding dangerous. 
Wherever a horse dies, or other carrion lies, these little 
animals gather and devour the putrid flesh voraciously. They 
also eat much plant food, but their chief diet consists of insects, 
mainly worms, which they detect underground by scent and 
then obtain by boring holes with their triangular armored snouts, 
turning round and round with their noses pushed into the soil, 
like animated gimlets, until they reach and seize the grub or 
earthworm they are after. Hudson describes the cleverness 
with which a tame one he had would trace a wild mouse to its 
lurking place by quartering the ground and following the scent; 
also how they search for the nests of ground-building birds and 
devour the eggs or fledglings; and especially how they kill 
snakes by leaping upon them, settling down across their writh- 
ing bodies, paying no attention to the reptiles’ striking and biting 
at their shells, and then swaying their bodies back and forth 
until the jagged lower edges of the shield have literally sawed 
the serpent into halves, when it is eaten. This and its related 
species are scarcer and more wary than formerly, not only be- 
cause they disappear rapidly and unaccountably as soon as a 
district is settled, but because they are hunted for the sake of 
their flesh by the help of dogs trained to rush and seize them 
before they can reach their burrows or disappear in impromptu 
excavations. Some of the smaller species are said to make their 
477 
Peludo. 
