Pink Fairy Armadillos

by | Jan 1, 2023

I discovered the existence of the pink fairy armadillo in a childhood visit to London’s Natural History Museum, Gazing into a cabinet filled with long-dead, moth-eaten taxidermy specimens, I wondered at a tiny gnomic creature perched on a shelf towards the back of the exhibit. Its silver pelt was topped by a shell resembling the lacquered armor of a samurai, and in place of legs were mere shrunken stubs from which sprouted formidable curved claws. A pair of minuscule eyes, barely visible under tufts of silky fur, seemed to glare fiercely out at me.

The diminutive creature’s appearance was endearing, ridiculous and faintly sinister all at once, a feeling which was only accentuated by the label that hung above it, reading Pink Fairy Armadillo, Distribution: Argentinian Pampas. The animal on display had clearly passed away a century or more ago. Death and its prolonged exposure to the elements had dulled its once vibrant pink hue to an unattractive mottled yellow. Nevertheless, despite its weathered looks, the specimen and its ethereal name still exuded a palpable sense of magic and the uncanny. It seemed to be a creature that belonged in a fairy tale or a fever dream. In a more prosaic sense, the label told me that it was a specimen of Xenarthra—the strange group of mammals that includes the anteaters, armadillos and sloths that inhabit South and Central America.

Last year, when I started writing about wildlife and conservation in Latin America, I got a chance to speak with Mariella Superina, a scientist who has studied the species for decades. I jumped at the chance to write a story about the animal. But while the scientific side of the story was undeniably fascinating, it was only one piece of the puzzle when it came to an understanding of this animal.

Just like the pink fairy armadillos’ rare forays above ground, I discovered that this animal had surfaced at different points in history and captivated the minds of naturalists and artists alike. I knew that I wanted to explore and write about this rich vein of cultural significance.

The Pre-Columbian pink fairy armadillo

Despite its harsh semi-arid environment, the Monte Desert in Argentina has long been inhabited by humans, with archaeological evidence suggesting that humans first dwelled there between 10,000 years ago and 14,000 years ago. As hunter-gatherer societies depend on the natural environment to survive, these ancient people probably had a deep knowledge of the plants and animals that surrounded them, the endemic pink fairy armadillo must have been one of those animals.

Monte Desert Photo by Mariella Superina

From colonial Spanish accounts, we know the names of several nomadic Indigenous tribes who roamed the desert at the time of the arrival of the Conquistadors, including the Diaguita-Calchaquí, Huarpes, Sanavirón and Comechingón peoples. However, the genocidal ravages of the Spanish conquest and the “Conquest of the Desert” by the Argentine military in the latter half of the 19th century resulted in the near extermination of much of the Indigenous population. The survivors were subjected to forced cultural assimilation, leading to the loss of their traditional knowledge, languages, and beliefs, though some of their descendants remain today and are actively working to reclaim and preserve their cultural heritage.

Nonetheless, it is plausible that the ancient peoples of the Monte desert may have held similar beliefs towards the pink fairy as the Indigenous Guarani peoples of neighboring Paraguay still do with its closest living relative, the Chacoan fairy armadillo. There, some Guarani tribes see the fairy armadillo as an omen of portending death, with others believing the animal to be the spirit of a deceased infant, because its disquieting distress call sounds eerily similar to that of a wailing baby.

Yet ironically the greatest influence of the Indigenous peoples on the pink fairy armadillo can be found in its very name in Argentina, enshrined in the Spanish language as pichiciego. A fusion of the Indigenous Araucanian word pichi, meaning “small,” and the Spanish word ciego meaning “blind,” it derived from both the colonists’ adoption of this term to refer to armadillos and the erroneous belief that the animal was blind.

Pink fairy politics: Colonialism and Commerce

In the early decades of the 19th century after Argentina had shaken off the yoke of Spanish colonialism in a bloody war of independence, the newly independent nation established diplomatic relations with the United States. This contact would facilitate a lively scientific exchange between the two newly independent countries which, among other things, would lead to the first scientific description of the pink fairy armadillo.

El Submarino in the Valle de la Luna, San Juan, Argentina, is typical of the landscape where the pink fairy armadillo dwells. Photo by Fernando de Gorocica, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32923588

In 1824 Richard Harlan, an American comparative anatomist was sent a package containing the bones of a dead animal by an American living in Argentina. After scrutinizing the remains closely and meticulously piecing them together, Harlan concluded that the remains belonged to a species hitherto undescribed. The specimen was baptized with the scientific name of Chlamyphorus truncatus in reference to the animal’s truncated armored plates.

A year later, in 1825, Argentina signed a “Treaty of Friendship and Commerce” with Great Britain. This event would mark the beginning of a strained relationship characterized from the start by the predatory ambitions of the British empire manifesting in political interference and even military interventions in the country. However, it would also prove to be a fruitful period for scientific discovery and the moment that the pink fairy armadillo would come to the First World’s attention.

At the height of its imperial expansionism, a symbiotic relationship of sorts had emerged between the British Empire’s mercantile networks and its scientific community. The close link and sometimes merging of the two interests would permit the documentation of flora and fauna by British scientists who either traveled to far-flung regions or received specimens from compatriots.

But it wouldn’t be until 1828 that a pink fairy armadillo would finally reach British shores. Upon arrival at the Zoological Society of London the specimen was inspected by the eminent naturalist William Yarrell who was astounded by the creature. “I obtained the very remarkable little animal that is today in the collection of the Zoological Society of London. Until now it has not been found except in the provinces of Cuyo, and even there very rarely. It digs the earth, and in its habits resembles something of the mole, because it remains asleep during the winter months; the natives call it the Pichiciego.

The original English name for the animal was probably ‘pink fair armadillo’ due to its pale colored fur, but at some point became “fairy.” The evolution of the animal’s name from “pink fair armadillo” to “fairy” occurred during the Victorian era when an obsession with fairies and spiritualism was at its height, reflecting the wonder the animal inspired. This fascination would fuel a demand for specimens to fill the natural history museums of Europe, as well as the private “cabinets of curiosity” of the wealthy.

As Argentina underwent rapid modernization in the late 19th and early 20th century, settlements expanded into the Monte Desert. Encounters with the mysterious pink fairy armadillo became more frequent and would cast their own spell. The written records of the time reporting these incidents are sometimes tinged with an unwitting magical realism that recalls Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

For instance, during the construction of a railway in Mendoza, an engineer chanced upon one and was so entranced by the animal that he named a railway station after it. Likewise, military and exploration expeditions report discovering the creature nestled among the blankets of men sleeping on the ground, likely having stumbled upon them during its nocturnal wanderings.

The pink fairy armadillo in Argentine literature

At first glance, the Pink Fairy Armadillo would seem to be a creature fit for the hallucinatory short stories of the great Argentine writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. Yet, while Borges famously had a love for fantastical beasts and took his inspiration from the Bengal tiger even in blindness and Cortázar meditated on the Mexican axolotl and its “diaphanous interior mystery,” curiously, neither writer ever mentions the native pink fairy armadillo in their works.

Another acclaimed Argentine writer, Rudolfo Fogwill, however, did find a muse in the pink fairy armadillo, with the title of his novel Los Pichiciegos even bearing the name of the animal. The story follows a group of young Argentine soldiers conscripted to fight in the Falklands War, who desert and seek refuge in caves and underground trenches during the final weeks of the conflict. As they await their inevitable capture or death, the deserters, who have come to embrace their harsh subterranean existence, refer to themselves in a self-deprecating manner as the “Pichiciegos” and refer to their hideout as the pichicera or “the pink fairy armadillo lair.”

In an interview given shortly before his death in 2010, Fogwill, a lifelong resident of Buenos Aires, revealed the bizarre circumstance in which he first learned of the existence of the pink fairy armadillo. In 1980, after being arrested for criticizing the country’s military dictatorship and waiting to face a jury, the writer found himself locked in a cell with two brothers from the northeastern Andean province of Catamarca. As he listened to the men recount colorful tales of their rural life he heard one of the brothers jokingly express his hunger, “Do you know how I’d relish eating a pichiciego right now?”

A few years later, the Falklands war broke out. Fogwill, now familiar with the armadillo and its habits threw himself into writing his masterpiece using the animal not as a magical realist prop but as a gritty metaphor for both the underground life of his characters and their constant state of animalistic fear. A man given to extremes, Fogwill described the process of writing the book as being the “product of a seventy-two-hour writing binge without sleep, fueled by cocaine.”

Upon its publication in the aftermath of the conflict and the unraveling of the military dictatorship, Los Pichiciegos would have an enormous impact on Argentine society with one notable critic even likening the impact to a “literary earthquake.” The book’s anti-war sentiment, criticism of the regime, and haunting existentialist themes resonated with a readership hungry for democracy and weary of censorship and lies as well as succeeding in bringing the species to the attention of many Argentines for the first time.

Magical realism in the service of conservation

From the scientific to the literary to the political, the pink fairy armadillo has made an outsized impact on Argentina and the world beyond but what of its conservation and how might its cultural importance play a role in this?

Cultural importance is recognized to be an essential factor in conserving species and ecosystems. “Flagship species” serve as symbols of conservation efforts, and are usually chosen for their cultural and charismatic appeal. These animals are used to raise public awareness and support for protecting their habitats, leading to a ripple effect that benefits the broader ecosystem.

With few exceptions, flagship species tend to be the so-called “charismatic megafauna,” such as the mountain gorilla, giant panda, and African elephant and lion of the Old World. In South and Central America, where megafauna is not as diverse, large carnivores such as the jaguar and spectacled bear are obvious, albeit convenient, choices as ambassadors for conservation initiatives.

The lilliputian pink fairy armadillo, a creature imbued with mystery, aesthetic appeal and cultural importance challenges the assumption that only larger mammals possess the magnetism to elicit an emotional impact on people and interest in conservation. The magic of Argentina’s pichiciego may prove to be a powerful talisman to rally support for the conservation of the species and its habitat, the Monte Desert.

James Hall is a conservation biologist, English teacher and freelance writer based in São Paulo, Brazil. A conservation practitioner he works as the volunteer research coordinator of the Mountain Marmoset Conservation Program.

In memory of Dr. Virgilio Germán Roig (1930-2022), whose tireless work to elucidate the mysteries of the Monte Desert, the pichiciego and other beguiling beasts will continue to inspire generations of scientists and conservationists in Argentina and throughout Latin America.

 

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