Crawford’s gray shrew is a desert specialist, tiny and nocturnal, that survives without the damp ground most shrews need, and its Texas records cluster around Aransas, Padre Island, and Laguna Atascosa, the brushy, semi-arid coastal plain of deep South Texas where dense scrub gives it cover to hunt insects after dark.
The 177 Texas records show a real shape: a February spike, a smaller rise in July, and low counts through late spring and fall, likely tracking when surveys and trapping happened rather than any true burst of shrew activity. Unlike many of Texas’s small mammals, this one carries a reassuring state rank, S4, apparently secure, close to its G4 global status, so the record here looks more like a genuinely stable, if easily overlooked, population than a vulnerable one.
Full species profile
