The long-tailed shrew is a mountain specialist in a state with two distinct mountain systems, and New York’s record honors both. Essex County in the Adirondacks and Schoharie County at the northern edge of the Catskills each hold 12 of the state’s 34 records, with Greene and Ulster counties filling in the Catskill side. The lowlands between the two ranges are essentially blank.
That two-range map is probably closer to real distribution than to observer bias, since this shrew demands cool, rocky, high-elevation forest floor: talus slopes, mossy boulder fields, and damp conifer duff where it hunts insects through the crevices. The Dix Mountain Wilderness and Sentinel Range Wilderness in the Adirondacks and the Indian Head and Hunter-West Kill wildernesses in the Catskills are exactly that kind of ground. Still, shrews only enter the record when someone traps or surveys for them, so thin coverage in the lowlands shouldn’t be read as a surveyed absence.
Reports crest in July and August, with a second, smaller rise in October and November, tracking the months when mountain field work happens and the shrews are most active near the surface. NatureServe ranks the species apparently secure in New York, and the record is steady enough to support that.
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