Elliot’s short-tailed shrew is a small, secretive burrower of leaf litter and thick ground cover, and its Texas records sit in Big Thicket and Davy Crockett National Forest, the damp piney woods of East Texas that mark the western edge of this shrew’s range. It’s active by day and night alike, tunneling through litter for insects and worms rather than foraging out in the open.
Only 12 Texas records exist, and every one falls between January and July, nothing at all in the second half of the year, too sparse to call a real seasonal pattern rather than just a run of thin luck finding an animal that rarely surfaces. Texas ranks it S1, critically imperiled, while the species is secure across its core range in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, a sign that this is genuinely rare ground here, not just under-recorded.
Full species profile
