This 18-pound armadillo was found in the window well of a Lawrence home.

It’s no longer uncommon to find armadillos migrating from the south through Kansas, but a Lawrence resident was recently surprised to find one of the armored critters trapped in his home’s window well.

Two Kansas University biologists came to the rescue of the 18-pound armadillo – and the homeowner, who lives near Free State High School.

“It was the biggest armadillo I’ve ever seen,” said Scott Campbell, a research associate at the Kansas Biological Survey. “It was challenging, because he fell in a 5-foot well.”

Campbell said the homeowner – who wasn’t identified – called Animal Control to remove the creature, but that agency declined. The man’s plea for help eventually reached Campbell and his associates, who intervened to relieve the “suffering of the homeowner.”

Lawrence Police Sgt. Paul Fellers said Animal Control typically responds to only domestic animal calls.

Calls about wild animals, he said, should go to a pest control company – or to the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.

Catching armadillos isn’t necessarily an easy task, said Marty Birrell, nature interpretive supervisor at the Prairie Park Nature Center.

“When you grasp the armadillo they can contract and it literally pops up and can launch itself out of our hand,” she said. “Basically it scares the daylight out of the predator and they can escape.”

But Campbell and colleague Stan Roth captured the armadillo by grabbing it by the tail. They put it in a burlap sack and took it to the nature center where Ruth Herman, a naturalist, released it near her property in Linwood.

Birrell said the creature may be one of many “hitchhiking armadillos” that have found their way to the Midwest via a combine or other farm equipment. They often find a dark nook in the combine and they probably hang tight once the vehicle starts moving, she said.

“As they park in fields at night or in town at night, armadillos fall out; sometimes it’s in transit,” Birrell said. “Unfortunately it’s not a very natural way of expanding their range, but over the years we have seen more and more move by this way of transfer.”

Global warming has been suspected as a factor in the armadillos appearing in Kansas, but Lawrence scientists say that’s difficult to substantiate.

The animals reached the Rio Grande River in Texas in the 1850s, Campbell said, then farther north in Texas in the early 1900s. They reached southeastern Kansas in the 1950s, and now can be found in southern Nebraska.