Garden visitor dwarfed by the daisies Country Notebook

line and away, a stoat dashing across the lawn, a green woodpecker briefly feeding among the plant pots, a yellowhammer dropping by and a painted lady butterfly in the depths of winter.

This week it was one of the UK’s smallest mammals that caught my eye. In fact, so.small that I thought at first it was a large insect.

I was sitting at the dining room table, which overlooks the garden, and happened to see something moving in the grass near the edge of the lawn. The dark little shape was lower than the height of the grass stems and I assumed some hefty beetle was out and about in the sun.

Out of curiosity I decided to get up and pay a visit, and was astonished to find it was a shrew – and a tiny one at that.

Shrews look like mice, but with longer pointy noses, and although they can be numerous these insectivores tend not to be seen as they lead their busy little lives out of view in long vegetation and can be more active at night.

There are a few shrew species in Britain, and the most abundant is the common shrew, which is almost mouse-sized. However, this one in the grass was much smaller, and had a proportionately longer tail. It was a pygmy shrew, thumb-sized and weighing much the same as a one pence coin. Their metabolism means they need to eat more than their bodyweight every day just to survive, and they live fast and die young, having a maximum lifespan of around a year and a half.

Dwarfed by the daisies, it seemed perfectly content nosing its way through the lawn in search of food before it disappeared into the flowerbed. A little surprise on a sunny afternoon.