Short-Tailed Shrews

By Rosemary Conroy on Friday, August 5, 2005.

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The short-tailed shrew is no big deal- literally, it's a creature about the size of your thumb. But this tiny native predator not only has an outsized personality, it's one of only two poisonous mammals in the world.

Welcome to this week's edition of Something Wild. I'm Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.

This week's topic is no big deal- literally, it's a creature about the size of your thumb. But this tiny native predator not only has an outsized personality, it's one of only two poisonous mammals in the world.

Of course you're saying, the short-tailed shrew!

At first glance our diminutive subject looks like a rodent, but its tiny eyes and elongated snout should tell you that it's more mole than mouse.

Like it's subterranean cousin, the shrew is an insectivore. It spends a lot of time underground hunting down slugs, grubs, and any other bugs it can sink its fangs into.

That's probably why its eyes are pinpricks and its schnozz a stiletto- it's much easier to smell your victims than to see them in a dark tunnel.

And like all shrews, the short-tailed is a voracious predator. It often consumes its weight in food every day, and is not above eating much meatier things like millipedes and millworms. Shrews will attack almost anything within reason.

But don't be afraid of them, even if they do use venom to stun their prey into submission. You would require way more poison than is possible for a short-tailed shrew to produce. Although a good-sized human would meet its dietary requirements for weeks, if not months!

I'm pretty sure that no person has ever been killed by a shrew. They can and will, however, give you a nasty bite, so it's best not to handle them.

You're not likely to encounter shrews much anyway. They tend to stay underground, and are very focused on tracking down their next meal.

So, can you guess which is the only other poisonous mammal? It's a very different creature in a very different part of the world.

It's the duck-billed platypus, of course.

Something Wild is a joint production of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, New Hampshire Audubon and New Hampshire Public Radio. For Something Wild, I'm Rosemary Conroy.