The very hungry shrew

Eating 1.25 times your own bodyweight every day doesn’t sound like a recipe for tininess, but that’s what Britain’s smallest mammal has to do just to stay alive. A pygmy shrew typically weighs just four grams, a plump one six grams, and it has a metabolism so fast it can’t last more than a couple of hours without a meal. The velvety brown Sorex minutus measures 7-10cm from hairy tail-tip to pointy nose, which it uses to sniff and feel for spiders and woodlice to eat, borrowing the burrows of other animals or tunnelling through undergrowth to elude raptors. It also secretes a foul smell to deter predators, but it’s not perfect: cats still kill them, they just don’t eat them. The tiny shrews have a penchant for the shadowy nooks of stone walls – probably your best chance of spotting them – although you might hear them chittering indignantly in the grass if they meet. Solitary by nature they turn to angry terriers, waving their tales and fighting. As the saying goes they ‘live fast, die young’: few survive more than a year, although as a species they’re the oldest shrews in Europe, found in the fossil record of the early Pliocene five million years ago.