Untamed Shrews

The shrew--the animal namesake of bad-tempered women--is the smallest but fiercest and most voraciously carnivorous of all mammals. The brown, beady-eyed, two-to four-inch creature looks like a tiny, sharp-nosed field mouse, and lives under logs, leaves, roots and grasses in the woodlands of America, Asia and Europe. Last week Cornell's Zoology Professor William Robert Eadie (now a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy) made known some new facts about this diminutive killer.

Unrelated to the rodent family and far from mouselike in its habits, the shrew is properly an insect eater. But, declared Eadie, the shrew rarely behaves properly: in 56% of shrews' nests he examined there was direct evidence that the occupants had been feeding largely on field mice. "Circumstantial evidence," he added darkly, "points to a higher figure." Field mouse population of meadows near the experiment dropped from 80 to twelve mice per acre.

Unlike the human variety, whose shrill voice it shares, the shrew's bad temper is the result of a too good digestion: So rapid are its metabolic processes that a shrew will starve to death in a matter of hours if it does not keep eating. If two shrews are caged together overnight, only the stronger will be found in the morning.

Because their lives are an unrelenting and insatiable search for food, shrews exist in a perpetual state of nervous tension. So touchy are they that when a fox or a weasel, probably mistaking the rank-smelling shrew for a field mouse, lays a predatory paw on it, the shrew usually expires from shock.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.