Southern short-tailed shrew records in Arkansas, 106 of them, split across two very different kinds of ground: the bottomland hardwood forest of White River and Cache River National Wildlife Refuges in the Delta, and the pine-hardwood slopes of the Ouachitas around Hot Springs National Park.
A shrew of wet, low ground
This shrew needs moist soil and thick ground litter to tunnel through, and the Delta refuges supply an especially deep version of that: seasonally flooded bottomland hardwood forest where leaf litter stays damp for months and the soil rarely dries out. It’s a close relative of the northern short-tailed shrew, which occupies the Ozark highlands farther north, so between the two species, Arkansas’s short-tailed shrews roughly divide along a lowland-to-highland line, with this one holding the wetter, lower ground in the Delta and Ouachita foothills.
A near-blind tunneler with a heavy appetite
Tiny eyes and a short tail mark a shrew built for life underground and under leaf litter rather than above it. It hunts insects, worms, and snails by touch and smell as much as sight, and like most shrews it has to eat constantly to fuel a metabolism that burns through energy fast. Reports here spike sharply in February, which more likely reflects a run of winter trap surveys, when ground cover is thin and animals are easier to catch, than any real seasonal surge in the shrew itself.
Status in Arkansas
NatureServe ranks the southern short-tailed shrew S5, secure, in Arkansas, and it’s native across its mapped range in the state. Protecting the moist bottomland and slope habitat it depends on, especially the bottomland hardwood tracts at White River and Cache River, keeps the ground-level conditions this shrew can’t do without.
