I (accidentally) Camera Trapped one of New York's Smallest Mammals

It has been just over a year since I blogged last (December 2 2016). It not like I haven't been writing. I just haven't been blogging. I have been writing a monthly column for the Finger Lakes Times called "Speaking of Nature". Between the articles and Facebook posts, my itch to write has been scratched.
But I just retrieved a camera that I had deployed for a year and thought i would share the results here.
My first camera traps were all Cudeebacks and although I loved the fast trigger speeds and their ease of use, they just don't live very long. They become unreliable quickly and I don't use them for class projects. But my Dad and I set one last year with the intention of letting it just soak for months.

Dad and I set a camera trap in December 2016
Fremont, NY

To tell you the truth, I forgot about it. In fact, I had walked within 10 yards of it several times and didn't even notice it. Partly because I wasn't looking for it but partly because it had fallen off the tree...

Last image from an upright camera
Fremont. NY

The strap came loose. There is no evidence an animal did it. But I will never know. By March 30th, here was the angle of the camera:

Red Squirrel
Fremont, NY

And then the strap came completely undone and the camera came to rest on its side,

The original view

Same photo, cropped and rotated

Commercially available camera traps are not designed to capture small animals. Someone can have one especially made or home brew one themselves. So I rarely get shrew photos. And by rarely, I mean three times before. This shrew capture is by far the best. And it is of a shrew i never see in the wild.

Here is a mouse for comparison:

Deermouse
Fremont, NY

And here is the shrew:

Shrew, possibly Masked Shrew
Fremont, NY

I cannot tell the species from this photo. I suspect it is a Masked Shrew but it could be a Pygmy or a larger Smoky. We are talking about an animal that weighs between 2 and 6 grams. It takes 28 grams just to get to an ounce. This animal weighs as much as a few paper clips. They are so light that they do not trigger the live traps I use when capturing small mammals for class. i will probably never photograph this species again unless it is in the hand or I am using a special camera.

Winter shrew

We have an old farmhouse that features an unfinished basement. Consequently, we have mice more or less all the time. But over the weekend my wife reported a dark ball of fur darting past the washing machine and she concluded: It was a shrew. So I set a Sherman trap baited with peanut butter and within hours, I captured a short-tailed shrew. I placed him in a cardboard box and took a bit of video with my Go Pro. Got a minute? Watch the video here.

I wanted to get some photos of the shrew in snow but I didn't want to just release him outdoors. We have had a very cold winter so far with lots of snow. Letting him go outside might jeopardize his survival. So I came up with a different plan. I filled a large Tupperware container with snow and placed the shrew in it. I hoped that I could snap off a few photos before the shrew bolted for the dark corners of the basement. Much to my surprise, the shrew tunneled through the snow and climbed on the edge but refused to leave. I got my photos and then gently returned him to his adopted home.

One defining characteristic of our shrews is the dark enamel on the teeth. There are white-toothed shrews elsewhere in the world, but our shrews all have dark teeth.

Short-tailed Shrew
(2/15, Seneca Falls, NY)

The short-tailed shrew is very common and may be the most common mammal in New York State. They have small eyes and no visible external ears. They are NOT rodents and therefore not closely related to mice. In fact, the short-tailed shrew can actually prey on mice with their venomous saliva.

Short-tailed Shrew
(2/15, Seneca Falls, NY)

Aaaahh.... :) Check out the tiny black eye visible in the photo below. The real story is those whiskers though. This is an animal that uses scent and touch more than vision.

Short-tailed Shrew
(2/15, Seneca Falls, NY)

Shrew tunnels are smaller in diameter than mouse tunnels. Shrews are active all year and require an enormous amount of calories each day. I have read that the short-tailed shrew specifically takes in 75% of its own weight each day. In that is a lot to find in the subnivean world.  I hope my shrew ingests lots of spiders and maybe even some mice in that basement of ours!

Short-tailed Shrew tunneling in the snow
(2/15, Seneca Falls, NY)

Did you remember that this was all staged in a little Tupperware full of snow? Here is the shrew getting up on the lip. But after a moment, it was back into the snow!

One bonus photo: Shrew scat. Whether you call it shrew poop, shrew scat or shrew droppings, it is all the same thing. I am not sure how typical this scat is, but it looks very different than the pellets that are produced by mice.

Shrew scat
(2/15, Seneca Falls, NY)

Thanks for reading. Check out my other shrew posts to see a shrew nest and some baby short-tailed shrews.

Northern Short-tailed Shrew Nest, Latrine and Cache

Greetings everyone! I have been slow to blog in 2014 due to a very busy schedule. This weekend's wildlife encounter forced me out of exile and back into the blogosphere. On Friday evening, we hosted the FLCC Student Chapter of The Wildlife Society for a nice spaghetti dinner (thank you Laura!) followed by a woodcock walk on our property. We checked for tracks in muddy spots, looked at muskrat lodges in the wetland, learned a little about native warm-season grasses and tried to find spring peepers in the pond. But one of my highlights is always flipping over some old pieces of siding to see who might be living underneath.

Short-tailed Shrew
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

I should explain that I have been a "flipper-over" for a very long time. I saw my very first weasel when I was a teenager by looking under an old sheet of plywood. I found my first Norway rat under an old automobile hood. Childhood successes such as those made me a life-long investigator of all things flip-able. So I was very excited when our first piece of corrugated siding produced a short-tailed shrew. One of my students caught the shrew and I held it for all to see. Sasha (club adviser and FLCC Technician) noticed a nest and we concluded it was the shrew's. It was empty.
On Sunday, my wife and I took a walk to look for antlers and decided we could risk disturbing momma shrew and flipped the siding again. We waited patiently and within a few minutes, the shrew began to nose around at her newly disturbed world.

Molting short-tailed shrew
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

In the photo above, you can see a bit more of the shrew and she is clearly molting out of her winter coat. I guess it makes sense, but I honestly never thought of shrews molting before. Notice how small the eye is. Shrews are not known for having good eyesight. She slowly emerged from her tunnel and made her way into the grass...

Northern short-tailed shrew emerging from tunnel
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

There is the short tail that gives this species of shrew its common name.
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

I decided it was worth it to peek into the nest. I have only ever found one other shrew nest and blogged about it here. But if there were shrews in this nest, they would be less than two days old. We carefully peeled back the dried grasses to find a ball of leaves. And inside the leaves were eight tiny altricial shrews.

Baby shrews in nest
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

Look for five digits on the front foot to rule out mice
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

Baby short-tailed shrews in nest
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

We carefully covered the babies and I quickly snapped a few photos of the other items under the siding. There was a large pile of scat within a foot of the nest. I cannot imagine it was made by any other species (especially given how fresh some of the scat was). However, the diameter seemed rather large when I compare it to published information. Elbroch says up to 3/16 inches in diameter and although I did not measure the scat, it sure seemed larger than that. He also states that when they are feeding on worms or other soft bodied animals, the scats would be "soft squirts". Well, that certainly describes the freshest of the scats. Here is the latrine:

Short-tailed shrew latrine
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

Short-tailed shrew latrine. This is the end that was closest to the nest.
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

The piece of corrugated siding was about four feet by three feet. Besides the nest and the latrine, I noticed two spots with concentrations of earthworms. Now, this entire area was bare of vegetation, yet the only earthworms to be seen were in two small areas. They were alive but slow moving. I have to believe they were cached by the shrew. Have a look:

Worms cached by short-tailed shrew
Seneca Falls, NY (4/14)

I wonder if the worms had been injected with some of the venom these shrews have in their saliva. That would explain how they could be cached alive. The large one near the top of the photo looks damaged.
I hope I did not disturb her too much but I learned a lot from this encounter. Latrine, cache, nest.... it was all here! I will check again after the young have left the nest and see what else I can find.

Northern Short-tailed Shrew nest unearthed!

Northern short-tailed shrew young
(Seneca Falls, 4/12)

Today was the day I was finally going to dig up the drain pipe that has been giving me fits for several months now. I anticipated several hours of digging, poking and prodding ahead of me. Well, I was only into it about five minutes when I unearthed a nest of young short-tailed shrews. Their were four in all. I grabbed them up and brought them to Laura to hold while I took photos.

Have a good look at these guys on the left. Shrews are often mistaken for mice even though they are not close relatives. Mice are in the Order Rodentia while shrews are in the Order Soricimorpha. On the inside, there are some dramatic differences between shrews and mice, but let's judge this book by its cover. First, shrews have five digits on the front feet while mice have four. Secondly, shrews have very small eyes and external ears while mice often have prominent ears and big eyes to match. These shrewlets are showing their external ears because their fur is still not to full length.
As mentioned above, I scooped up the little guys and brought them to Laura. She held them as I took a few photos.

Shrewlets
(Seneca Falls, NY 4/12)

Although they were all active, one in particular seemed to want to explore...

Northern short-tailed shrews
(Seneca Falls, NY 4/12)

He even crawled up Laura's sleeve. You can just see his tail in the photo...

Northern short-tailed shrews
(Seneca Falls, NY 4/12)

These guys were so photogenic that I could have done this for hours. But that would not have been in the best interest of the shrews. I wanted to get them back to the nest site quickly. I placed them back down on the ground where I first found them. There were only a few remnants of the nest remaining. Some leaves and shredded plastic were all that was left of their natal den.

Laura gathered up some fresh grass clippings and we covered the shrewlets up. I hoped that mom would come back to take care of them I have done this with mice before and watched as the mother came and relocated the babies.

Make-shift shrew nest
(Seneca Falls, NY 4/12)

I busied myself with other tasks and tried to forget about the little shrews. Would mom come for them or would I end up trying to hand-rear four baby animals with some of the fastest metabolisms of any mammal on the planet? Finally, I could take it no more and gently peeled back the grass to find a re-excavated tunnel heading. Mom did indeed return and whisked off her young. So this is a story with TWO happy endings. The shrews survived and I have to wait at least a few more weeks to tackle that drain pipe to assure they have left their new nest :)