Tennessee holds 509 occurrence records for the smoky shrew, and every one of them sits in GBIF rather than a casual sighting, the expected pattern for an animal that spends its life buried in leaf litter.
A northern shrew hanging on in cool mountain coves
The smoky shrew is largely a species of colder, northern forest, and Tennessee sits near the southern edge of where it can survive. That range holds on in the cool, moist cove forests of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the shaded ravines of the Cumberland Plateau around Fall Creek Falls, places with the deep leaf litter, rotting logs, and mossy rock cover this shrew needs to tunnel through in search of insects and other small invertebrates. Land Between the Lakes’ bottomland ravines offer a lower-elevation version of the same damp, sheltered ground.
A record built by traps, not photographs
Records spike sharply in June through August, but that pattern almost certainly reflects when researchers run pitfall traps for small-mammal surveys, not a true summer activity peak. A shrew this size has a metabolism fast enough that it has to feed nearly constantly, whatever the season, whether or not anyone is out trapping to record it.
Status in Tennessee
NatureServe ranks the smoky shrew S4, apparently secure, in Tennessee, and it’s native to the state. Its foothold here depends on the state’s cooler, moist mountain forest holding onto the same conditions this northern species needs at the southern tip of its range.
Full species profile
