Reason for a Change-Mitch’s Blog

Earlier this spring I was walking on the east side of Dunns’s Woods, when I heard some rustling in the woods. I looked around for a squirrel, or maybe a bird in the leaves, but I saw nothing. I then heard the rustling again, and saw the leaves moving, making line of popped up leaves as the creature beneath was moving.

I’d seen a mouse on the other side of the woods by Bryan Hall last year, it was eating a discarded sandwich, but was running under the vines instead of leaves. I kept watching and in a moment, two rodents appeared out of the rather large pile of leaves a few feet from the brick path. I was taken aback as they could not be mice, they were not quite the right shape and their noses were not pointed, but rather squared off like a mole. But they were not moles, I’ve seen them. These animals were scampering after each other, perhaps mating.

I tried to remember their look and first googled mouse and vole, but found the shrew family. I looked at the DNR website and found a listing of mammals in Indiana, and the Northern Short-tailed Shrew, Blarina brevicauda, the largest and most common of North American shrews was surely what I saw. Not only were the pictures I found a match, but even more convincing was that their habitat and behavior were exactly right. I can now see their leaf tunnels and even a larger “house” that I previously assumed was a pile accidentally left by the grounds crew. The shrews were larger than a mouse, and gray all over, with a nose that was squared off at the end. I did not see that they had four toes rather than the five of rodents, but that must have been the case.

I found out that the shrew is not a rodent, but actually a part of the soricidae family, which contains both mole and shrews. This was most evident in the nose, and their body shape and color a much different from a mouse. Here is some interesting stuff from the Smithsonian website:

“Northern Short-tailed Shrews have poisonous saliva. This enables them to kill mice and larger prey and paralyze invertebrates such as snails and store them alive for later eating. The shrews have very limited vision, and rely on a kind of echolocation, a series of ultrasonic “clicks,” to make their way around the tunnels and burrows they dig. They nest underground, lining their nests with vegetation and sometimes with fur. They do not hibernate. Their day is organized around highly active periods lasting about 4.5 minutes, followed by rest periods that last, on average, 24 minutes.”

They live short active lives, rarely getting to 2 years old, and they eat massive amounts of food, up to half their body weights in some species. I’ll try to keep track of them, but if they sleep as much as mentioned above, I may not find them.

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