Crawford’s gray shrew, better known as the desert shrew, is one of Arizona’s most elusive small mammals, an insectivore so seldom encountered that open occurrence databases hold only 434 Arizona records for it, most of them from museum specimens and pitfall-trap surveys rather than photographs.
The shrew that lives without water
This is the most drought-hardy shrew in the country, and Arizona sits squarely in its element. It hunts insects, spiders, and other small prey through desert scrub, grassland, and the litter around agaves, cactus, and packrat middens, drawing nearly all the moisture it needs from that food rather than from standing water. The records lean heavily toward the southeastern corner of the state, with Cochise County far ahead of the rest and Pima and Santa Cruz counties following, tracing the desert basins and grassland valleys of the Sky Island country.
A year-round animal seen almost never
Like all shrews, the desert shrew never hibernates; its racing metabolism keeps it hunting in every season, mostly after dark. The uneven scatter of records through the year says more about when biologists set their traps than about the animal, which stays active under cover the whole year. At three to five grams, gray and blunt-nosed with tiny eyes and ears, it is easy to overlook even where it is common.
Status in Arizona
NatureServe ranks the desert shrew S3, vulnerable, in Arizona, and it is native here. Its sparse records show that it is hard to detect, but they don’t measure its abundance.
Full species profile
