Shrews are our friends

By Terry Plumb

I live with a shrew, and that's a good thing.

Actually, I'm fairly certain more than one shrew lives in my yard, although I've seen only one, and that was by happenstance.

I was chatting with my next-door neighbor early one morning when she said, “There's something in those leaves.” Sure enough, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a small gray critter foraging. It was systematically plowing its nose under magnolia leaves like a nearsighted miser searching for a farthing that had rolled off the counting table.

I'm no naturalist, but I was sure of my diagnosis.

My neighbors enlist me as pool boy when they're on vacation, and I have extracted more than a few shrew carcasses from the filter.

A few days later, I fished a live shrew out of the pool where it was dog-paddling desperately. Even though I saved its little life, the beast scurried away without so much as a thank you.

It was as a young reporter for The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune that I was introduced to shrewhood. At an American Museum of Natural History field station in south Florida, I accompanied the director as he inspected small-mammal traps. In one we found a tiny, mouse-like creature with pointed nose and tiny eyes.

Shrews, which are mostly nocturnal animals, are practically blind, he told me.

It takes an expert to distinguish the southern short-tailed shrew from its northern cousin (their habitats overlap in the Piedmont, according to a University of Georgia Web site). Since the ones I have seen were clad in Confederate gray, I choose to think of mine as the southern species.

Why Hollywood hasn't made a horror flick featuring giant shrews is beyond me. They would make ball pythons look like pansies.

A shrew must consume its body weight in other creatures every day, or starve. Shrews have the highest metabolism of any North American mammal, with a pulse rate of up to 700 beats a minute.

A critter that is between three and five inches long probably wouldn't freeze you in your tracks, but then again you aren't its size. Shrew salvia contains a toxin that can paralyze a mouse-sized creature within five minutes. The short-tailed shrew also features a pair of glands on its flanks and rump that emits a strong odor.

In other words, a creature without redeeming qualities?

Hardly. If you wanted to open a restaurant for shrews, your menu would include worms, slugs, snails, grubs, insects, centipedes, spiders and small vertebrates.

Any creature that devours slugs, snails, grubs and mouse-size vertebrates is a friend of mine.

The first year I planted hostas, slugs chewed holes in nearly every leaf. (Some people recommend eradicating slugs by putting out bowls filled with beer. Slugs are attracted to the beer, fall in and drown. To me, it's a waste of good beer.) Thankfully, the last year or so, slug damage has been minimal, which I attribute to my voracious ally, the southern short-tailed shrew.

Same thing with the herb garden I planted for my wife: Last year, it was a daily race to see who harvested the basil — me or the slugs. This year, the basil barely has been gnawed. Sure enough, when I pulled back some of the bushier herbs, I spotted two small holes in the soil. I suspect they were dug by shrews, which dig tunnels a foot or more deep.

Voles, another prey of shrews, can be even more devastating to ornamentals than slugs. Often called field mice, voles tunnel under plants and gobble roots. I recently talked to one woman who was near tears in discussing how her hostas had been truncated below the surface. She diagnosed the problem as voles. I prescribed shrews as a cure.

I was thinking about trying to breed shrews, but that could be tricky. Another website said they lead mostly solitary lives; male shrews enjoy fleeting encounters with the opposite sex, then desert the female to raise the kids by herself. (Boy, haven't we heard that story before!)

Besides, the Mrs. said she wouldn't let me put a sign in the yard, advertising “Shrew for Sale.”