ShrewCam

The small mammal trail camera has been regularly recording shrews, along with the dozens of mice and voles, both in my garden and at the local nature reserve.  When I looked closely I realised that there were recordings of pygmy shrews as well as common shrews from both sites.

Compared with a common shrew (Sorex araneus), a pygmy shrew (Sorex minutus) is noticeably smaller; has a significantly longer and hairier tail; has two-tone colouring, lacking the paler flanks of the common shrew; and has a rather domed head and a thin pointed snout.  Some of these features are quite hard to pick out on a video, or even on frame grabs, because shrews move at such high speed.  The body weight of a pygmy shrew is 2.5-7.5g and of a common shrew 6-12g.  In the video I have added a bank vole (14-40g) and a wood mouse (13-27g) for comparison.

One advantage of the small mammal camera box is that the animals are all more or less at the same distance from the camera, making a size comparison easier.

In a still frame from the video, this is a pygmy shrew, showing the long tail in the first image.

This a rather blurred high-speed common shrew but you can see the size difference.

On the same scale this is a bank vole.

And a wood mouse.