Southern short-tailed shrews have racked up 70 Illinois records, still just enough to sit in the rare bucket alongside most of the state’s small mammals that rarely turn up in casual sightings. Reports stretch from Shawnee National Forest in the south, up through Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, to the Upper Mississippi River refuge lands, a spread that traces the shrew’s range across nearly the whole length of the state rather than favoring one spot.
November holds the largest share of Illinois records, more than double the next-closest month, April, with long stretches of the year showing almost nothing reported at all. That gap says more about how hard a velvet-furred, nearly blind shrew is to notice while it tunnels through leaf litter hunting insects and worms than about when it’s actually active. NatureServe lists the species S5, Secure, in Illinois, so the thin record count looks like a detection problem, not a shrinking population.
