Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
💪Nine-banded Armadillos
🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
PS. ATX Outsiders is our community where people get to know each other IRL outside each month. Join us!
Upcoming events I’m hosting:
Friday, July 31: Purple Martin Party: So many birds! If you’re on the fence, just trust me on this one.
July 25, 2026 in full parking lot triumph
Sunday, August 2: Reverse Brain Rot: Read and write with other readers and writers at Barton Springs
Monday, August 10: Austin Reading Club: Feed your brain something nourishing
NATURE SPOTLIGHT
This February I was ding-dong-ditched by an armadillo.
The day before, my kids halted a soccer ball kicking street session for a pickup truck to drop trou and reveal a leathery, erect-eared ball in a live-trap.
Such a nuisance! The truck man said. Third one! Destroying my yard!
Good news, I said. My yard here is impervious to that exact scenario.
Fourteen hours later: a frenzied thudding at my door. Ominous scratching. Like a stereotypical scary movie victim, I opened the door. I discovered an armadillo fleeing my porch. I pursued. At my garage, an armadillo convention, animating my leaf bags, the boxwoods.
What in the 8:20am suburbia is happening here
Today we’re digging into armadillos.
Let’s get to know them
crowned as the State of Texas Official Small Mammal, nine-banded armadillos are the kind of creature that, when you’re new to Texas, are this mysterious entity that seems to exist exclusively as roadkill
armadillo in Spanish means little armored one
in Aztec, it’s turtle-rabbit
there’s an armadillo identity crisis underway—2024 research says what we’ve been calling nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) is technically four separate species, now classified as the Mexican Long-nosed Armadillo (Dasypus mexicanus)
there are other types of armadillos elsewhere, including three-banded, giant, pink fairy, hairy, and various other band counts
cat-sized, armadillos have a protective shell made up of bony plates and keratin called carapace, and a tough, leathery underbelly
they eat insects and larvae, and apparently cat food—my neighbor’s porch cat dish lures in Cleo the Cat as intended, and also a steady stream of raccoons, foxes, skunks, and now a true horde of armadillos
Coming to terms with being an outdoor armadillo, not an indoor armadillo
armadillos are big fans of burrowing, especially in soft ground, with den intentions. They dig using their “short, strong legs with daunting claws”
nocturnal and crepuscular, they’re active at night, dusk, and dawn, which helps clarify the minimal diurnal human overlap
Related: it took a decade of having a yard in Austin before I made the connection between the holes and these buddies
noisy while foraging and fairly easy to sneak up on. When surprised, they leap straight into the air as a startling mechanism, which is extremely relatable
with heavy shell-awareness, armadillos tackle narrow streams by walking under water
for significant water crossings, they swallow a bunch of air to inflate their stomachs, balloon themselves to twice their normal size, and buoy themselves across. It takes several hours for them to decompress the excess air
oh, and leprosy is a thing. Up to 20% of nine-banded armadillos carry the disease. Good news for humans: most humans have natural immunity and transmission would require direct, heavy contact or eating the meat. Hold off on recruiting an armadillo to be your pet, even if they persistently knock on your front door
But wait, there’s more
We’re going to get to armadillo reproduction via some anecdotal pit stops.
Shortly after my armadillo-attempted home invasion, I added the word biomimicry to my vocabulary. I was invited to join a batch of ecologists, biomimics, strategists, and educators to consider what 3.8 billion years of trial and error might teach us about, oh, you know, life.
And so the cross-disciplinary nourishment of a design charrette, where we retreated to nature to consider Nature as Mentor. The experience included a UV-lit fungi hike (with a shockingly high quantity of scorpions), a 7am birding hike that involved a herd of snail shells and a flock of wild turkeys in bulky flight, and the thrill of being in a room with curiosity and awe as the default.
The eventual output: a deck of local nature educational cards to facilitate curiosity and connections.
This was not a solitary scorpion
Then the work scattered across coasts and continents to Miro boards and Google docs. Our awe spread to the annotations.
In our shared doc about the nine-banded armadillo, Biologist Deb just casually dropped this reproduction bombshell:
Female armadillos keep one fertilized egg until the conditions are appropriate, and they’re willing to wait even more than a year for the world to be tame.
At signs of a hospitable environment, the armadillo splits that one egg across four identical young, sharing one placenta.
This is nature’s copy/paste.
This is not science fiction.
That means clones! Every time!
Baby armadillos are ALWAYS identical quadruplets.
The gamble is that efficiently scaling means double doubling down on one idea and running with it.
And that left me muttering “how am I ever expected to jump on a Zoom under these conditions” and with the visceral urge to grab strangers by their shoulders to tell them about baby soft-shelled quadruplet armadillos.
What. a. world.
And I can only imagine, if I were to cross paths with the man depositing armadillos from his yard into my yard, how he’d reckon with the awareness that he’s at least one armadillo shy of the full cohort, and Cleo’s cat dish is on standby for our siloed buddy.
Feeling 501c3-Friendly?
If biomimicry appeals to you, Gina from Biomimicry for Social Innovation is a gem.
Choose your own adventure:
a. book BSI for leadership facilitation—you can cull projects based on armadillo logic
b. pre-order these nature cards in bulk—you need a couple hundred of these decks, right?
c. toss some cash toward their fundraise
d. email Gina to geek out over applied nature thinking
Sharing these with founder pals last week got them the nickname Entrepreneur Tarot
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ July 30: The Drop-In: music for the dog days
🗓️ July 31: Pitch and Run ATX: pace with pals
🗓️ July 31: Purple Martin Party: I’m piggybacking on an official Travis Audubon event. No trespassing required. No cicada eating required.
🗓️ August 1: The Board Walks: float between interesting conversations
🗓️ August 1: Plant Swap: plants as currency
🗓️ August 2: Reverse Brain Rot: I’m hosting this collab with ATX Writing Club. Read/write, swim optional.
🗓️ August 2: Birding + Nature Hike: riverside birding
🗓️ August 3: SporeCorps: Mushroom Cultivation 101: get to know both wood-loving and dung-loving mushrooms
🗓️ August 4: Heart of Texas Orchid Society: if resilient plants appeal to you, you’ve got options
🗓️ August 4: Trail Restoration Tuesdays: put some aggressive plants in their place
🗓️ August 4: Nature Walk: Birds, Butterflies, and Books: the whimsical triad
🗓️ August 4: Plant Bingo Night: I bet the people watching is also good
🗓️ August 5: Offshore Austin: Cowork on a yacht
🗓️August 8: Flower Arranging Workshop: This sold out last time, so hop to
🗓️ August 10: Austin Reading Club: I’m hosting. Get those pages in, and peek at what other folks are reading.
🗓️ Through August 15: Singin’ in the Rain at Zilker Hillside Theater
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, I hope you copy and paste your most resilient ideas in a humane environment.
-Nicole
OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS
🪵 Would my perspective be useful to a project you’re working on? Email me to get on my waiting list.
🪵 Are you looking for a community of people in the startup ecosystem who go outside together? I’ve got you.
🪵 Speaking of, I chatted about local community building on this thing called a podcast
🪵 Are you sitting on a misogi-esque story? Spill.
🪵 Follow my calendar to know when we’re rallying.
🪵 I also write essays: this one is about witnessing a bison harvest.
🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Forward it to your enemies to make them suffer too.
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