Virginia’s reports concentrate along the Coastal Plain, especially the barrier-island grasslands of Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore and the wetland edges of the Great Dismal Swamp farther south. Marsh fringes around the Chesapeake Bay round out the picture. All three settings match this shrew’s usual ground: dune grass, marsh edges, and old fields with dense, low cover rather than open sand or deep woods.
Unlike most shrews, which live alone and fight off their own kind, this species often shares nests and burrows, huddling together for warmth in cold weather. It hunts mostly insects and worms, and it moves through matted grass on narrow packed-down runways that keep it mostly out of sight of predators and people. Virginia’s thick dune and marsh vegetation gives it exactly that kind of cover.
Records turn up across the year in Virginia, but they climb sharply in September and again, more steeply, in December. That late-year jump likely reflects young shrews dispersing and turning up in new places, the same pattern seen elsewhere in the species’ range, rather than any real seasonal peak in activity.
Full species profile
