Last week, I regaled you with a story of a highly unexpected (but wonderful) wildlife sighting that I made while sitting in my “thinking chair” at the edge of my meadow. Rather than seeing a bird come to enjoy some of the seed that I had provided, I noticed that a little meadow vole was getting in on the action as well.
It started out as nothing more than a brief flicker of movement seen out of the corner of my eye, but when I knew what to look for (and more importantly, where to look), I had no trouble at all seeing this little mammal feasting beside the birds. It was the result of an adult lifetime practicing observation as a student of a master from the past.
In the fall of 1992, I was just starting work as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I had just moved to the town of Montague and one Saturday morning I discovered the magic of the Montague Book Mill. At first, it seemed like any other bookstore, but then a particular volume caught my eye; when I opened it, my life changed. The book was “A Sharp Lookout,” by that most wonderful of all 19th Century naturalists, John Burroughs, and as I read the opening words of the essay that bore the same name, something inside me just clicked.
One hundred and ten years earlier, in 1882, Burroughs had put pen to paper and shared this gem of wisdom with the world: “One only has to sit down in the woods or the fields, or by the shore of the river or the lake, and nearly everything of interest will come round to him.”
The longer I act on this advice, the more of a genius he seems to be.
Today, I think of myself as a Burroughs devotee.
This is why I go to the same spot day after day and season after season. I am now so familiar with the scene in front of me that I can detect subtle changes. It was one such change that caught my attention and revealed that little vole. What I simply never expected was to detect a subtle change in the vole itself. The movement was in the same place, but the color was off and the shape seemed wrong. So, I raised my big lens, aimed at that special little patch of ground and gasped in surprise the next time the little mammal came out of hiding.
There was indeed a vole there, but there was also a completely different small mammal called a short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicaud). What the what? Well, perhaps I should explain my surprise a bit. The short-tailed shrew is a very small mammal that specializes on the consumption of other small animals. With teeth that are far more reminiscent of a dog than a rodent, the shrew is a voracious predator of invertebrates and even animals like mice.
Unlike a vole, which has thicker hair, a shrew will have very short hair that gives one the impression that the little animal is covered in velvet. Because of its habit of tunneling through the leaf litter in search of worms, snails, insects and even unfortunate small mammals, the shrew has a more slender sausage-shaped body with greatly diminished ears. Even more fascinating is the fact that the shrew’s eyes are tiny to the point of being almost vestigial.
The only thing big about the shrew is its teeth.
This animal is so small (about 3.5 inches) and has such a fast metabolism, that it must eat nearly constantly. Day or night, rain or shine, summer or winter, the shrew is an active and persistent hunter of any creature of equal or lesser size. To help it in its quest for food, the shrew has actually evolved to be venomous and the bite of a shrew can paralyze an animal as large as a vole (which also happens to be one of its favorite prey animals).
So, I suppose it was not that surprising that a shrew had picked up the trail of a vole and followed it to the pile of birdseed that I had put out. What was surprising was the fact that the shrew turned out to be such an enthusiastic consumer of sunflower seeds. Again and again, over and over, the little velvet-gray animal zipped out into the short grass, grabbed a seed and then zipped back into hiding. While doing research for this column, I learned that I was not the first to see a short-tailed shrew do this — it was simply my own personal discovery of yet another fascinating facet of the natural world.
So, as the opportunities to sit outside begin to diminish with the approach of winter, I hope that you are able to get outside and make the most of those dwindling opportunities. Grab yourself a warm beverage, an acceptably comfy place to sit and give it a try. You never know what will come round if you simply sit quietly and soak up the sights and sounds of nature.
Bill Danielson has been a professional writer, photographer and shrewd observer of nature for 23 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the Massachusetts State Parks and currently teaches high school biology and physics. Visit www.speakingofnature.com for more information, or head over to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.