Indiana’s shrew records include 225 entries for the northern short-tailed shrew, nearly all of them iNaturalist sightings. Reports come from strikingly different corners of the state, from Lake Michigan’s dune forests to the limestone bluffs of the south, showing how little this shrew cares which region it lives in as long as the leaf litter runs deep.
A venomous hunter hidden in the leaf litter
This shrew spends most of its life just under the surface, in shallow burrows and natural runways through moist leaf litter and loose soil. It’s one of the few mammals with venomous saliva, a toxin from glands near the jaw that can subdue insects, worms, and even small mice, letting the shrew store live but paralyzed prey for later. Brown County State Park’s thick hardwood leaf litter and Clifty Falls State Park’s limestone-gorge forest floor, both in the Southern Hills and Knobs, offer exactly that kind of cover, while Indiana Dunes National Park shows the same shrew working the wooded swales between the dunes in the north.
A June peak, then a fall rise that likely means dispersing young
Records build through spring and peak in June, then climb again in September and October, well after the spring litters born earlier in the year have grown enough to leave their mother’s territory. That fall dispersal sends more individual shrews moving through unfamiliar ground looking for a burrow system of their own, and that movement likely drives the second rise.
Status in Indiana
NatureServe ranks the northern short-tailed shrew S4, apparently secure, and native to Indiana. It persists across the state’s contrasting forest floors, from dune woodland to limestone hill country, wherever leaf litter stays deep enough to hide a shrew’s tunnels.
