Southern short-tailed shrews have only 7 Illinois records since 2000, enough to sit in the occasional bucket alongside most of the state’s small mammals that rarely turn up in casual sightings. All of them come from southern Illinois, four from Johnson County, two from Jackson, and one from Randolph, with Cache River State Natural Area the one named site.
No month holds more than two records, so there’s no seasonal pattern to read. The thin record 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.
