A Tale of Two Shrews

Konrad Lorenz noted in King Solomon’s Ring: ‘..shrews are particularly difficult to keep; this is not because, as we are led proverbially to believe, they are hard to tame, but because the metabolism of these smallest of mammals is so very fast that they will die of hunger within two or three hours if the food supply fails. Since they feed exclusively on small, living animals, mostly insects, and demand, of these, considerably more than their own weight every day, they are most exacting charges.’

Shrews feed in leaf litter sometimes coming onto surface. Food is less abundant here and they may starve to death quite suddenly giving rise to the belief that on seeing a human shrews drop dead.

Ferocious
Shrews are fierce creatures, for their size more ferocious than the great carnivores, racing and chasing their pigmy prey with savage eagerness, and ready to do desperate battle with any fellow shrew that does not please it.

The Common Shrew is a dark brown little mammal about 70-85 mm long and weighs 3.5 -14 gms. It is extremely common throughout mainland Scotland as high a 2700 ft. but is unknown in the Northern and Outer Isles where it is replaced by the pygmy shrew. The common Shrew is white-toothed in contrast to others that have a rusty tinge to their teeth.

It is widely reported in both the Old and New Statistical Accounts, and is so abundant as to be the second most frequent British mammal after the field vole. It is common all over Tayside. Though best seen in April, they are often most active in winter.

Their common vocalisation is subdued muttering but, when angered, they scream aggressively. They have a reputation for fighting and in confrontation make a lot of squeaking which is more of a singing competition than a fight in which little injury results.

Shrews were believed to have the ability to poison cattle and to cause a painful disease of the limbs which could be cured by interring a live shrew in an ash whose leaves thereafter cured the lameness.

Gilbert White enlarges on this in The Natural History of Selbourne: ‘Near the church there stood a very old grotesque hollow pollard-ash, which for years has been looked on with no small veneration as a shrew-ash. Now a shrew-ash is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the pains which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew-mouse over the part affected: for it is supposed that a shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature, that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of use of the limb.

‘Against this accident, to which they were continually liable, our provident fore-fathers, always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew-ash was made thus: into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew-mouse was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt, with several quaint incantations long since forgotten...’

The Pygmy Shrew, the smallest British mammal, is from 43-60mm long and weighs 2.5-6 g. It is generally distributed and is common in many parts of Scotland (even on the top of Ben Nevis). It is the most widely distributed mammal in Scotland, being found throughout the mainland and on the islands except Shetland, North Rona and St. Kilda. Pygmy shrews do not dig but instead use the runs and holes of other shrews; its movements are fast and abrupt.

The periodicity of activity of the pygmy shrew differs from the common so, though the habitat is the same, they rarely meet. When they do, the pygmy is submissive, hiding its head in the ground; fights, when they do occur, are restricted to screaming matches.

©Robin Hull