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Short-tailed Shrew
Also called: Mole Shrew.
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Length.—5 inches.
Description.—Rather stout, tail short, about one-quarter the length of the head and body. Colour: sooty plumbeous, slightly lighter below; varying in depth in changing light as the fur is disturbed. Front teeth chestnut coloured at the tips.
Range.—Atlantic States to Nebraska, south to Ohio, Maryland and the mountains of North Carolina. Replaced southward by slightly different varieties.
Range.—Southern Indiana and Virginia to Florida.
Range.—Tropical Florida, especially in the Everglades.
Range.—Nebraska to southern Pennsylvania and New Jersey and southward, except in the mountains.
Range.—Tropical Florida.
There is a class of little beasts common enough trough-out all our Northern States, yet hardly known by name or otherwise. Resembling the mice in outward appearance; in their manner of living and getting their food they may almost be said to copy the habits of the weasels. They have the lithe, supple bodies and short legs of the weasel tribe without the characteristic slimness of form; their flesh, like that of the weasel’s, is dark, fibrous and strong smelling. This might be attributed to their similarly carnivorous habits, if it were not true that the flesh of most meat-eating animals is comparatively light-coloured and tender.
It might even be objected that shrews are not truly carnivorous but insectivorous, the fact that they are actually the smallest of beasts rendering them powerless against all but a very few of their kindred.
But ravenously fond of al kinds of flesh they certainly are, and I believe that the young of the smaller ground-nesting birds and perhaps young mice are frequently eaten by them. T would not greatly surprise me to discover that they occasionally attack creatures larger than themselves. Of the several distinct species that should be found in most of the Eastern States, I have found but one really abundant. This one is catalogued as the mole shrew, and is found almost everywhere in great numbers. It is commonly mistaken for a genuine mole, and small wonder; about the only conspicuous difference being in the size of the fore feet, A mole’s fore feet are broad and hand-shaped to the extent of being a deformity, and stand out from the shoulders like flippers. A shrew’s feet, on the contrary, including those of the little chap under discussion, are perfectly normal in appearance and like those of mice.
The mole shrew is four or five inches long, the tail about one. It has a cylindrical, pig-like body, and dark ashy gray fur, lighter beneath. They are obstinate, savage, little brutes, but are unquestionably of immense service to the farmers, spending their lives in most vigorous pursuit of insects of all kinds. They combine impartially the habits of the moles and shrews, sometimes burrowing along just beneath the turf which they push up in low ridges which intersect each other, apparently quite at random, without exhibiting any of the system characteristic of the works of the mole.
This is evidently done in search f insects, though the tunnels made in this manner are afterwards used as runways, and it may be for nurseries. This partially underground existence shows its effect on the species, not only in the mole-like shape of the body, but in the size of the fore feet, which are a little larger and broader than the hind ones, the fore feet of the other shrews being small and delicate.
But the mole shrew in adopting the habits of the moles has not given over the ways of its own people by any means. A true mole on the surface of the ground is a creature completely out of its element, its chief desire being to bury itself from sight as quickly as possible. The mole shrew, on the contrary, spends much of its time in the open air from preference, running about over the fallen leaves of the forest or along the shaded galleries of stone walls, which it is as fond of following as is the weasel.
Their keen noses enable them to scent meat at a considerable distance, and when the have succeeded in finding any that may have been left by the larger hunters, they fall upon it ravenously, tearing at it and devouring it with all the ferocity of wolves.
One that I caught in a trap had already, when I found it, disposed of the raw meat, which ha served as bait, and when confined in a cage immediately seized upon whatever meat was offered it, whether raw or cooked, without discriminating between kinds. Beef, pork and cold chicken—all went the same way, while the fury of his appetite was being appeased. Both in eating and drinking the projecting taper-like nose or trunk was turned up in order to enable him to use his mouth more freely, for a shrew's mouth opens from beneath almost like that of a shark. The sensitive trunk is doubtless of service in poking about beneath the leaves and in soft earth after worms, of which the mole shrew is particularly fond.