The masked shrew is one of North America’s smallest mammals, weighing about as much as two dimes and needing to eat almost constantly to fuel its racing metabolism. In North Dakota it turns up around the wetland-and-prairie mosaic of J. Clark Salyer, Chase Lake, and Des Lacs national wildlife refuges, places with the damp grass and leaf litter this insectivore hunts through for beetles and larvae.
Records here lean heavily on GBIF specimen data, 299 of 300 total, the kind of trapping-survey evidence museums and biologists collect rather than casual sightings, since a shrew this size and this fast rarely poses for a photo. Reports cluster hard in July, with September and October close behind, a pattern more likely tied to when survey trapping happens than to any real seasonal shift in the shrew’s own activity, which continues year-round.
Full species profile
