ON THE WILD SIDE
It’s easy to tell shrews apart from other small mammals. Although they are small and “mouse-like” the long nose gives them away every time, leading to their old name of “picked-nosed mice”. The mouse similarity ends on the outside, and these creatures are tiny balls of insanity. Unlike most rodents, they walk on the soles of their feet instead of their toes. Rather like bats, they can use echolocation to make up for their poor eyesight.
The three species living on the UK mainland have dark red teeth and secrete a musk that smells so foul most mammals won’t eat them. They also have poisonous saliva which they use to paralyse prey to keep it alive for up to two weeks. Two additional species of shrew live on islands off our coasts. They are much less aggressive and have less terrifying white teeth. We’re not here to talk about the gentle island boys though, we’re talking about the vicious ones. The pygmy shrew is our smallest mammal, measuring only 6cm including its long tail.
Shrews are incredibly aggressive and bite hard and deep. They can move at an unbelievably rapid pace, too.
With trees in leaf and birds singing less, it is hard to spot our feathered friends, so look to the microbeasts! Bramble flowers attract lots of insects – get spotting.
Their high metabolisms mean they must eat at least their own weight in insects every day. Scoffing so many different things means they carry plenty of parasites.
In winter, a shrew’s body shrinks so that it doesn’t need to eat as much – its brain can be nearly a third smaller too. Shrews were thought to cause disease, but you could be cured by visiting a “shrew-ash” made by boring a hole in a tree, putting a shrew inside and leaving it to die.
It was thought the dying shrew’s hatred was so strong it would give the tree magical healing properties. Insane!