New Hampshire’s occurrence data holds 1,893 records of the short-tailed shrew, one of the largest counts in this batch, most of them logged through GBIF.
Life under the leaf litter
A short-tailed shrew spends nearly its whole life below the surface, tunneling through leaf litter, duff, and loose soil in search of insects, worms, and other invertebrates, and biting prey with a venomous saliva that helps subdue it. That kind of ground cover is common across New Hampshire’s forests, from the hardwood hills of the Merrimack Valley to the mixed and coniferous stands of the White Mountains, so the species isn’t tied to one part of the state the way a mature-forest specialist would be.
A summer spike that likely tracks survey timing
Records jump hard from June through September and stay low the rest of the year. A short-tailed shrew doesn’t hibernate and keeps hunting through the cold months in tunnels under the snow, so that summer cluster more likely reflects when small-mammal surveys and trapping happen than any real seasonal shift in the animal’s own activity.
Status in New Hampshire
The short-tailed shrew is native to New Hampshire, and NatureServe ranks it S5, secure. Its dependence on leaf litter and loose forest soil, rather than any single habitat type, keeps it well distributed across the state.
