Killing Shrews

Posted by Sheri Amsel Dec 12, 2006

I have never seen a shrew in the wild. I’ve seen mice, voles, moles, and even kangaroo rats but never that tiniest of mammals. So it was with much astonishment that I started to see dead shrews on our porch a few summers back. We had a new cat that was just coming out of kittenhood and hunting at night, so it should not have surprised me to see small bodies appearing on our front step, but shrews? Every morning I marveled at the tiny and delicate creatures she dispatched nightly. They were as small as my thumb, with minuscule, beady eyes and a pointed snout.

I hoped they would lead to larger prey… like mice, since that was why we got the cat in the first place. But as time went by I became resigned to it — this cat was a shrew hunter. There’s nothing wrong with that in general, except for the fact that shrews are not the pests that mice are. Shrews are carnivorous by nature, though they will eat berries, mushrooms and plant matter in the summer. If left to their own devices they could have helped the cat rid us of mice, if she hadn’t been killing them off at a rate of 30 a month!

By the end of that summer the shrews she was killing began to get smaller and smaller until they were regularly half the size of my pinky, a truly tiny mammal. I had the distinct feeling that she had decreased the shrew population to such an extent that she was down to trapping immature shrews as they left the nest.

She no longer kills anything more than the catnip, but I wonder if the shrew population has recovered from their summer of death. I will never know though because just like before that summer, I have never once seen a shrew in the wild.

For more about shrews: http://mammals.suite101.com/articles.cfm