Tennessee’s occurrence record for the southern short-tailed shrew runs to 558 entries, with two distinct spikes, one in late spring and one in fall, more a fingerprint of how small mammals get surveyed than a sign of the shrew’s own rhythm.
A shrew of the warmer, lower ground
This species belongs to the southeastern coastal plain and Piedmont more than the high mountains, and its Tennessee range reflects that: it’s most at home in the moist soils of the Highland Rim, the Nashville Basin, and the bottomland forests of West Tennessee, tunneling through leaf litter for insects, worms, and snails. At the higher, cooler elevations of the Appalachians, including the upper reaches of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the closely related northern short-tailed shrew takes over the same underground role, and the two species largely divide the state’s shrew habitat by elevation rather than sharing it.
Two peaks, one survey calendar
Records climb sharply in April through June and again in October and November, the two windows when small-mammal biologists most often run trapping surveys, avoiding both summer heat and winter cold. A shrew’s underground life means it stays active and feeding through every month regardless, so this double hump in the data reflects field-season scheduling more than any real shift in the animal’s own habits.
Status in Tennessee
The southern short-tailed shrew is treated as native to its mapped Tennessee range, though the state hasn’t assigned it a NatureServe rank here. Its underground habits make trapping records far more informative than a casual sighting ever could be, which is exactly why Tennessee’s occurrence map for this shrew looks the way it does.
