Surprises await when exploring desert landscape

“The Framing of the Shrew” began the headline of a recent article in The Guardian by Katharine Gammon. It told of the first-ever filming and photographing by a group of young student scientists of an elusive California species, the Mount Lyell shrew.

To achieve this feat, the group buried small cups to create 150 tiny pitfall traps and slept no more than two hours at a time in order to check the traps frequently enough to keep the animals from dying of starvation.

The article brought back a memory of the time I photographed a shrew just outside of Beatty, Nevada. It was not a Mount Lyell shrew (there are almost 400 known species), but I was totally surprised to find a shrew in our desert.

Before that encounter my only acquaintance with a shrew was a literary one, having covered Shakespeare’s comedy “The Taming of the Shrew” while teaching British literature to high school seniors. As used in that play, “shrew” is a term for an ill-tempered, aggressive woman.

An online artist friend was creating digital art of faeries, and I was on a quest to photograph some possible habitat for her creations. I had gone to a small wooded area just north of Beatty where I knew there was a hollow stump that might serve as a faerie house.

I had a macro (close-up) lens on my film Nikon and was down on the ground focusing on the stump, when I saw movement in the dried leaves and grass. So it was that I photographed a creature I had never seen before but recognized immediately.

Shrews are tiny creatures, about the size of a mouse or even smaller. Although they look like a mouse, except for their long snouts, they are technically not rodents, but are more closely related to moles.

They eat insects, and have such a high metabolism that they have to eat almost constantly, and they consume as much as twice their body weight in food per day.

Shrews also have an astoundingly high heart rate and can die when it jumps even higher from their being startled.

My shrew was evidently not startled by my camera, but kept foraging for food among the ground cover.

Some people think that desert wildlife is all snakes, lizards and coyotes, but it is much more full of life — and of surprises.

Richard Stephens is a freelance reporter living in Beatty.