Merriam’s shrew breaks the shrew rulebook: instead of damp streamside cover, it lives in dry sagebrush and grassland, slipping through burrow runways left by voles and pocket mice. Every one of New Mexico’s 209 records comes from GBIF specimen data with no iNaturalist photographs at all, which fits a shrew this small and this rarely seen above ground.
Records cluster near Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, Santa Fe National Forest, and Gila National Forest, spanning very different elevations and vegetation, evidence of scattered trapping surveys rather than one core range. January carries by far the largest monthly count, likely reflecting when past survey trips happened to run rather than any true winter surge in activity, since shrews this size stay active through the cold.
New Mexico lists the species S2, Imperiled, a notably more urgent rank than its globally secure IUCN status, and with barely 200 occurrence records nationwide, this is one of the more poorly documented mammals in the state.
Full species profile
