Shrew

In brief

Sorex sp., Soricidae, order Eulipotyphla.

- Resident, seldom seen
- Native. Genus Sorex, species undetermined
- Eats insects, worms and other invertebrates

Where it lives

Sorex spans North America and Eurasia, and California alone holds around a dozen species. Two are plausible at 2,300 feet in Calaveras County: the ornate shrew, Sorex ornatus, of foothill grass and brush, and Trowbridge's shrew, Sorex trowbridgii, of shaded litter under trees.

When you see it

Photographed on December 2, 2023 at 1:29 in the afternoon. Shrews keep no schedule and work in short bursts through day and night, because the survivable gap between meals is measured in hours.

What it eats

Insects, spiders, worms, snails and larvae dug out of the litter, at anywhere from half its body weight to more than all of it in a day. Shrew teeth do not regrow the way rodent incisors do: they wear down across a life of roughly a year, and a shrew that outlives its teeth starves with food in front of it.

Here

Two frames on broken clay and grass, nose down in the litter. The snout names the family before anything else: long, mobile, tapering well past the mouth, and loaded with whiskers. The eye is a black bead barely wider than the pupil inside it, the ear is a small furred whorl nearly buried in velvet fur, and the feet are pale pink with five slender clawed toes and no digging spade, which is what separates a shrew from a mole.

Shakespeare had the metabolism backwards

The insult started as the animal. Old English screawa is the mammal; the sense of a malignant person arrives in Middle English on the back of a superstition that the bite was venomous. Pliny listed eighteen cures for that bite, one of them tearing the shrew open and holding the carcass against the wound.

The Taming of the Shrew is where the word landed hardest, and Petruchio's method in it is starvation. He keeps Katherina from food and from sleep and calls it love, and she names the treatment in Act 4, Scene 3:

Am starved for meat, giddy for lack of sleep,

In a person that program takes days to work. In the animal the word was borrowed from, it takes an afternoon. A shrew carries no fat reserve worth the name, and a few hours of an empty stomach kills it, which is the whole reason this one was out working the litter in daylight at 1:29 on a December afternoon rather than waiting for dark.

One correction while the superstition is out: venomous saliva in shrews is real, and it belongs to other genera - the short-tailed shrews of eastern North America and the water shrews of Eurasia. This one eats beetles.