Pygmy Shrew Field Notes
~by Jim Eagleman
I
t wasn’t long after I was hired as a seasonal employee at Brown County State Park in the mid-70s, that I heard of a research project. Some workers told me it was in a remote location, so I went searching. I learned it was conducted by a professor and some students from an Indiana university. When I arrived, they stumbled out of university cars, sleepy, stretching, and complaining. They were carrying trash bags full of large cans—the kind used in a commercial kitchen— and disappeared in the woods. I must have appeared official in my uniform and was greeted suspiciously. The professor admitted later that he had not applied for a DNR collecting permit allowing him to collect in the protected state park. He quickly had the students go about their work and got busy himself. I was more interested in learning what they were doing than if they had the proper permit. “Shrews,” the professor finally said. “We’re looking for different shrews.” Many pitfall traps, the cans, were buried at ground level to capture the small mammals. The students came back several times to monitor what
52 Our Brown County • July/August 2022
was caught and record their findings. Trap lines were installed along moisture gradients, starting at the top of a dry ridge, and descending into moist ravines. I knew shrews were insect eaters, and unlike mice and other rodents, lived a nervous life scurrying through the forest herbal layer, looking for beetles and worms. But I didn’t know different shrews had a preference for where they lived, or that there were several different species. A few years later, and now as the park’s full-time naturalist, I was soon entrenched in the property’s most controversial and pressing issue: an over-sized deer herd. Historically, Indiana state parks had been established as nature preserves since their conception in 1916. No management of plants or animals had been conducted since those early days, nor had it been necessary. With no hunting of the property’s chief herbivore and protected within its boundaries, deer numbers at Brown County had grown over time to huge levels, with the forest’s understory badly damaged. Wildflowers and grasses, flowering shrubs, and young trees—colorful each spring and attractive and food to many insects—had virtually disappeared, eaten to near oblivion by hungry deer. A biologist friend called me one day and asked if I had heard of a study that might help me with the deer debate. “You’re the public relations guy, aren’t you? You might like to read it,” he said. “It deals with shrews, and they can be considered an indicator species.” The ecologic upset of species with which deer coexist would Continued on 55
