Family SORICIDAE 61 



with vV'Ood shavings in the bottom and a half-pint glass jar placed 

 on its side for a nest chamber, makes an ideal cage. Water 

 should be available at all times, and food should be offered in 

 liberal quantity. An ideal food, used with success by Dr. Oliver 

 P. Pearson of the University of California, who has raised 

 many of these shrews, consists of about equal parts of dry dog 

 meal and hamburger, or horse meat, mixed to hamburger con- 

 sistency by the addition of water. This diet can be supplemented 

 with worms, beetles, and grasshoppers. With proper care, short- 

 tailed shrews may live in captivity to be nearly 3 years old, but, 

 in the wild, their life-expectancy probably never exceeds 1 year. 



Signs. — The usual gait of the short-tailed shrew in soft snow 

 is a walk, and the resulting tracks consist of unpaired foot- 

 prints evenly placed along the trail, fig. 33, at about 1-inch in- 

 tervals, with the tail mark between them curved gently from 

 side to side as a result of the swaying of the short-legged body. 

 A running shrew leaves paired footprints and an interrupted 

 tail mark; the distance between each set of paired prints then 

 is about 5 inches. 



Droppings of the short-tailed shrew are greenish black when 

 fresh, slightly brownish when dry, spindle shaped, about a third 

 of an inch long, and coiled In various ways. 



Distribution. — The short-tailed shrew Is a common species 

 throughout Illinois. The subspecies Blarina brevicauda brevi- 

 Cauda (Say), with larger Individuals, occurs in the northern 

 part of the state, and the subspecies B. b. carolinensis (Bach- 

 man), with smaller Individuals, occurs In the southern part. 

 The area of Intergradatlon between these two subspecies is 

 poorly known. The range of the species embraces roughly the 

 southeastern fourth of North America; it extends northward 

 Into southern Canada and westward to about the 100th meridian. 



CRYPTOTIS PARVA (Say) 



Least Shrew Old-Field Shrew 



Description. — The least shrew, fig. 49, is a gray-brown min- 

 iature of the short-tailed shrew. It can be distinguished from 

 the masked, southeastern, and pigmy shrews by its shorter tail 

 and usually by its more grayish color and more effectively con- 

 cealed ears. It differs from the short-tailed shrew by its smaller 

 size, fig. 4, and grayish brown rather than blackish color. 



