Ground Pangolin Burrow Behaviour: A Closer Look Underground
Life Below the Surface
The ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii) spends much of its life out of sight. By day it retreats underground, curling into a ball inside a burrow where the temperature is cooler, the humidity is higher, and the risk of predation is dramatically reduced. By night it emerges to forage, moving methodically across the savanna in search of ants and termites. Understanding how the ground pangolin uses burrows — how it digs them, selects them, modifies them, and depends on them at different life stages — reveals a great deal about why this species is so well adapted to the harsh conditions of African dryland environments, and why habitat degradation poses such a serious threat to its survival.
Physical Adaptations for Digging
The ground pangolin is not the most powerful digger among African mammals, but it is remarkably effective given its body plan. Its forelimbs are equipped with three large curved claws — the central claw is the longest and most robust — that are used both for tearing open insect mounds and for excavating soil. When digging a burrow, the animal braces with its hindlimbs and uses powerful foreleg strokes to loosen soil, which is then kicked backward and out of the tunnel entrance.
The scales that cover most of the pangolin's body serve a protective role both at the surface and underground. When moving through a tight burrow, the overlapping scales protect the skin from abrasion by soil and root material. The scales around the head are smaller and more flexible, allowing the animal to manoeuvre in confined spaces. The face itself is largely unprotected by scales and the pangolin keeps it tucked when curled up in its defensive ball posture.
A muscular tail provides leverage and balance during digging and plays a role in sealing the burrow entrance when the animal retreats inside — the tail is sometimes pressed against the opening, adding a barrier against predators and cold air.
Types of Burrows Used
Ground pangolins use two broad categories of burrow: those they dig themselves and those excavated by other species. Self-dug burrows are used more frequently for extended rest periods and for raising young. Burrows originally created by aardvarks (Orycteropus afer) are particularly important secondary shelters, because aardvarks are capable of digging systems far more extensive than a pangolin could create unaided, providing a ready-made retreat network across the landscape.
Burrows dug by springhares, warthogs, and other medium-sized mammals are also used. Ground pangolins seem to assess burrow suitability based on diameter, depth, and orientation rather than its creator, occupying and occasionally modifying openings that offer adequate shelter.
Self-Dug Burrows
When a pangolin digs its own burrow, the structure is typically a single tunnel descending at a shallow angle into the soil for between one and five metres, terminating in an expanded chamber large enough for the animal to curl up in. The entrance is usually positioned at the base of a bush, rock, or termite mound, providing concealment and structural support for the roof of the tunnel.
Digging effort appears to correlate with conditions. In areas with hard, compacted soils, pangolins spend more time modifying existing burrows than creating new ones. In sandy or loamy soils, new excavations are more common. The time required to dig a functional burrow from scratch can range from a few hours to multiple nights of effort.
Temporary vs. Permanent Burrows
Field studies using radio-telemetry have revealed that individual ground pangolins do not commit to a single burrow but cycle through a repertoire of resting sites distributed across their home range. In studies conducted in South Africa and Botswana, individuals were observed using between 20 and 50 different burrow locations within a single year, returning to the same sites cyclically with intervals of days to several weeks.
This rotation pattern may reduce parasite loads — insects such as ticks and mites that accumulate in a burrow are less likely to establish high densities if the host animal is absent for extended periods. It also spreads disturbance across a wider area, preventing the concentration of scent cues that might help predators identify a predictable resting location.
Radio-tracking studies in southern Africa have recorded individual ground pangolins using more than 40 distinct burrow sites within a single year, cycling between them rather than committing to a permanent den.
Thermal Regulation Underground
The African savanna is subject to extreme temperature variation. Surface temperatures may exceed 40 degrees Celsius on summer afternoons, while winter nights in the southern African highveld can drop below freezing. The ground pangolin, being a mammal with a relatively low basal metabolic rate, is more sensitive to temperature extremes than many similarly sized species.
Burrows provide thermal buffering. Even at modest depths — one to two metres — soil temperature remains substantially more stable than surface conditions. A burrow that holds 22 degrees Celsius may protect an animal from afternoon heat of 38 degrees at the surface, or from overnight cold that would otherwise force costly thermogenic activity. This buffering effect is one reason why burrow availability has a direct influence on the distribution and density of ground pangolins across different landscape types.
During winter in southern Africa, ground pangolins may enter torpor-like states characterised by reduced activity and lowered body temperature. They do not hibernate in the strict sense, but their movements become less frequent and their foraging bouts shorter. The burrow is essential during these periods as an insulated microclimate that reduces the energetic cost of staying warm.
Burrows and Reproduction
The relationship between burrows and reproductive success is particularly significant. Female ground pangolins give birth in burrows, and the pup is born relatively helpless — it is small, its scales are soft, and it depends entirely on its mother for warmth and protection in the early weeks of life. The burrow provides the stable microclimate and predator exclusion that the pup requires during this period.
Mothers with pups tend to use fewer burrows over a given period and are more selective about the sites they choose. Deeper burrows with more concealed entrances are favoured. The pup begins riding on its mother's tail during foraging excursions from around three to four weeks of age but retreats to the burrow with her during daylight hours for several months.
As the pup matures, it begins to follow foraging routes more independently and eventually splits from its mother, establishing its own burrow network within or adjacent to her home range. The timing of this separation varies but typically occurs before the next breeding season.
Predator Exclusion and Defence
Burrows provide the ground pangolin's primary defence against predation. Lions, leopards, hyenas, and African wild dogs are all documented as predators of pangolins in the field, but successful predation events are relatively rare. When threatened at the surface, a pangolin's first response is to curl into its characteristic defensive ball, relying on its overlapping scales to resist attack. When a burrow is accessible, the animal retreats underground instead.
Once inside a burrow, the pangolin is extremely difficult to extract. It wedges itself in place using its muscular tail and powerful legs, and the scales protect its body from attempts to drag it out. Hyenas and honey badgers are documented making attempts to excavate pangolins from burrows, but success is unusual for animals of that size. Lions lack the digging capability to pursue a pangolin underground and typically abandon the attempt.
Ecological Role of Pangolin Burrows
Ground pangolin burrows do not simply benefit the pangolin. They create shelter infrastructure used by a wide range of other species. Smaller carnivores such as mongooses, genets, and African wildcats use abandoned pangolin burrows as resting sites. Reptiles including monitors and various snake species exploit the stable microclimate for thermoregulation. Insects colonise burrow walls. In landscapes where large digging species such as aardvarks are absent or scarce, pangolin burrows may represent a disproportionately important source of shelter for burrowing species.
This secondary use means that where ground pangolins have been removed from a landscape — through poaching or habitat disruption — a cascade effect on burrow-dependent species may follow. The pangolin is a landscape engineer in a quiet but measurable way.
Threats to Burrow Availability
Several human-induced changes threaten the availability of suitable burrowing sites. Agricultural soil compaction, driven by heavy machinery and intensive grazing pressure, makes excavation difficult or impossible in former pangolin habitat. Tillage agriculture physically destroys existing burrow networks. In some parts of southern Africa, land clearing removes the shrubs and trees that provide canopy cover for burrow entrances, exposing sites to direct sun and making them unsuitable through thermal loading.
Aardvark populations, which provide the secondary burrow infrastructure that ground pangolins rely on heavily, are themselves under pressure from habitat change and conflict with farmers. Reductions in aardvark density translate directly into reduced burrow availability for pangolins using secondary shelter.
Conclusion
The burrow is not simply a resting place for the ground pangolin — it is the foundation of its survival strategy. Thermoregulation, predator avoidance, reproduction, and parasite management all depend on the availability of suitable underground sites. This makes the ground pangolin more sensitive to landscape change than its nocturnal, hard-to-observe nature might suggest. Conservation planning for this species must account for soil conditions, burrow infrastructure, and the presence of co-digging species like aardvarks, not just the direct pressures of poaching and habitat loss. Protecting the pangolin means protecting the ground beneath it.