Southern short-tailed shrews reach the western edge of their range in Texas, tucked into the moist leaf litter and dense ground cover of the state’s piney woods at Big Thicket National Preserve, Davy Crockett National Forest, and Sabine National Forest, exactly the kind of damp, wooded terrain this species needs to hunt insects and earthworms under cover.
The record pattern here is unusually lopsided: January alone accounts for well over a third of the state’s 199 occurrences, far outpacing every other month. That’s more likely a signal of winter trapping surveys turning up shrews in thinned leaf litter than any real seasonal surge in activity, since these shrews stay active year-round underground and beneath cover.
NatureServe lists the species Apparently Secure (S4) in Texas, and with records split fairly evenly between iNaturalist and GBIF, this small predator, one of the few mammals with a mildly venomous bite used to subdue prey, ranks as only an occasional find, likely reflecting how easily a shrew this size stays hidden in dense East Texas ground cover rather than any real scarcity.
