Mouse miles resident
Their sixth sense may even serve to identify predators and prey. From as far as 2 feet away, a short-tailed shrew’s echo-location helps it to find solid objects, holes, and places where grass may block a runway. Unique among mammals, the bite of a short-tailed shrew contains a poison that can paralyze and even kill its prey.Īs they tunnel, short-tailed shrews navigate like bats and dolphins: they emit ultrasonic clicks that reflect back to their ears to create an aural picture of the surroundings. Meadow voles are a popular item on the menu, along with mice, snakes, small rabbits, the hatchlings of ground-nesting birds, and even other shrews. Insects, worms, and spiders are fair game, as are centipedes and salamanders. Wielding sharp teeth, short-tailed shrews can consume more than their own weight each day, so they are not fussy about who or what they eat. With a metabolism that is 60 times the rate of a human’s, shrews are more often the predator than the prey. Snakes and owls actually partake of the pungent, as do other shrews, which have a poor olfactory sense.
And the cat is not necessarily leaving the shrew as a gift: short-taileds have glands on the hips and belly that emit such a strong, musky odor that most predators can’t stomach the idea of eating one. Often, here in northern New England, the deceased is a 4- to 5-inch-long northern short-tailed shrew, with its dark gray fur, inch-long tail, pinpoint eyes, sharp nose, fur-covered ears, and stubby legs bearing sharp claws for digging.
If someone tells me their cat has left a “present” of a dead “mouse” on the doorstep, I ask the usual questions: How big is it? What color is the fur? How long is its tail? What size are the eyes and ears? How pointed is its nose? Chances are that it’s not a mouse.
When it comes to nature, we tend to stuff things we don’t know into pigeonholes that are already defined by the familiar.