Short-tailed Shrew On the Hunt!

Ordinary day. I'm housecleaning. Twenty hungry cross-country athletes would arrive for a pasta dinner in a couple of days, and I wanted the place to look spiffy. I glanced out the kitchen window to see a tiny dark charcoal-colored shrew hurrying through the myriad red mulberry leaves that cover the lawn. I ran outside to see it and realized that I needed my iPhone to capture some video.

I'm so excited as I narrate this video that I initially misidentify the animal as a smoky shrew. Only upon watching the video and referring to a field guide do I realize that it's actually a short-tailed shrew, a much more common species, and incidentally the only one likely to be found inside a house. I lived for a short time in a converted barn in Connecticut that had an infestation of short-tailed shrews. It was much like being infested with white-footed mice (chewing of food packages, droppings, rustlings and scamperings) except that there was a lot more squeaking and bickering involved amongst the infesters. 

Short-tailed shrews will eat about anything. They're on a strict diet. They have to eat all the time. Kinda like mine. While I watched this animal it caught three different sizeable insects and reduced them to dinner in very short order. You'll get to see his best kill in this video.

So hunker down with me in the cold grass and the mulberry leaves and watch a short-tailed shrew do his thing. And please pardon the misidentification. Science Chimps get excited, and when they get excited they usually aren't right.

A couple of neat things about this video: First, when you're viewing the action through your iPhone, you miss stuff. I almost completely missed the initial find and kill of the prey item. Which meant that I missed the significance of the shrew's circling back, revisiting the prey item, then backing up and "baying" at me. He was defending his kill from me! And when he circled back he was going back to eat it. He thought I wanted to eat it too.

Second, the reddish-black teeth are typical of shrews. Look kinda nasty, like betel-stained teeth...When you find these little ebony-chestnut teeth in an owl pellet or fox dropping, you know they've been eating shrews.

Hope you enjoy this bit of amateur inquiry from a few inches above our lawn on Halloween Day.

photo by Bill Webb, "Science Chimp and Cub." Used without permission. ;)