Anyhow, after capturing an interesting array of other wildlife, I successfully trapped the yowling feral Siamese. Because he was still wearing a collar with an expired rabies tag from a vet clinic in a faraway city, the local cops were able to reunite him with his "owner", a woman who had been missing her kitty for over a year. She had resorted to hiring a psychic, after lost-pet posters and all else had failed. The psychic told her the cat was "living near water and happy". The psychic was right. The Siamese had gained weight in his year plus of living wild, and he could enjoy a view of the lake while lounging on the roof of our garage.
Lord knows he spent enough time up on top of the garage, sunning his rotund belly full of goldfinches and fledgling cardinals and baby chipmunks. The killer-Siamese's human mom figured out where I lived from vague police reports with a vicinity and house description... and she showed up to shower me with thanks! When she knocked on the door and sternly asked if this was the house that had trapped a cat, thinking of my husband's admonishments, I wanted to run and hide. Couldn't because she was hugging me too much.
A happy ending!
Especially for local birdlife.
When H. was sick, none of this bird feeding mattered anymore and I let it all go. The feeders were empty for several years, listing over and lurching sideways. Mostly empty: house sparrows filled one up with grass and twigs and raised families.
That was interesting, they reared their babies in a glass-walled house, just a few feet and a energy efficient double-walled pane of glass away from me, as I stood at my ironing board.
Last weekend, I straightened the tilted feeders and refilled them, and added a new platform feeder just outside the family room windows.
Cat TV! Our cats have been glued to the recently exposed row of three windows in the newly-christened family room. The family room, formerly known only as an inhospitable repository for stacked up dozens of boxes, filled with weird Victorian glassware, heaps of assorted trash and Lederhosen and bazillions of bridge tallies, etc.
Having set up an environmentally-friendly covered platform feeder (made of recycled plastics), what kind of visitors should be expected? Turns out they are of all kinds-- and most interesting ones!
The image above is famous. It is from a Flickr account labelled
Cool Cat in Bird Feeder, which was invited to participate in LOL Cats. I am still a dismal failure at getting any of our THREE digital cameras (let alone two cats) to cooperate with my blogging photography endeavors. If I could only get a digital camera to function, LOL Cats would be begging me for permission to post images of my cats observing the new platform feeder.
Meanwhile, believe me, the cats are gorgeous and spend most of their days happily glued to their observation posts on the windowsill. Watching chickadees and nuthatches and squirrels and, most recently, a mysterious animal that was moving at lightning speed.
My husband mentioned on Sunday afternoon that "the cats seem more interested in the fast mouse than anything else at the feeder."
I went to check out the "fast mouse" and it was like no mouse I had ever before seen...
a swirling tumult.
A pane of glass and about two inches of distance away from the kitties and my eyes. Diving over and under fallen leaves and bark mulch. Squirming above and then below my line of vision, under the feeder, next to the feeder, in the feeder. No visible ears, with minute, probably useless eyes. Tiny, stub-tail. Covered in a thick and lustrous pelt of dark black-gray fur.
This was NOT a mouse.
Not a mole.
Wracking my brain, suddenly figured it out: A SHREW!
More specifically, upon checking my field guides: the Northern short-tailed shrew (
Blarina brevicauda). A really common animal that I had never observed before.
How cool is this -- Northern short-tailed shrews are
poisonous mammals!
B. Brevicauda is thought to have emerged in the middle to late Pleistocene, but their ancestors were around much earlier than that. Here is a press release from the University of Alberta,
Researchers find first evidence of venom system in extinct mammal :
Currently, there are three types of living mammals with salivary venom-injecting capabilities: the Caribbean Solenodon (found primarily in Cuba), the North American short-tailed shrew, and the Eurasian water shrew. The Australian duck-billed platypus also has venom-injecting capability through a spur on its heel.
Okay, I did know about poisonous spurs on platypuses. Who doesn't? If you grew up reading The
Guinness Book of World Records, you know about the platypus. And solendons are just plain weird. I had heard of them but remembered nothing other than their name and strange appearance. But poisons in shrews? Especially local ones? WTF?
Here is reliable info from a print resource:
MacDonald, David (ed.)
The Encyclopedia of Mammals
Facts on File, c1994
P. 762+
…shrews can detect a very wide size range of prey, from 10 cm earthworms to 1-2mm nematodes. Even small mites and the animal’s own external parasites are not exempt…
The bite of some shrews is venomous. The salivary glands of the American short-tailed shrew, for instance, produce enough venom to kill by intravenous injection about 200 mice. The poison acts to kill or paralyze before ingestion, and may be particularly important in helping to subdue large prey like fish and newts which water shrews are known to take.
200 mice? They devour their own parasites? Famously voracious, shrews must consume an average of 43% of their weight daily. Shrews also cache food, especially in fall and winter. Their poison, which includes both a neurotoxin and hemotoxin, is much like snake venom. Specifically, shrew poison is like cobra venom.
Short-tailed shrews can not, like a snake, directly inject poison -- instead they
chew it into their prey. Shrews use their toxin to immobilize snails and other foodstuffs, which can then be cached in their larder, insuring a continuous supply of fresh foods. This is important if you need to eat 43+% of your body weight every day.
Owls are the most common predators of Northern short-tailed shrews.
B. brevicauda have pungent musk glands on their bellies and flanks, which make them unpalatable to most predators. Cats and dogs will pursue them but rarely eat them, the same is true for most other carnivores. They are just too stinky. Only my beloved great horned owls are regular predators of the short-tailed shrew.
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has an excellent brief article on
B. brevicauda, which includes animations, pictures and diagrams and a
link to a pdf of a much more detailed description from the American Society of Mammalogists (ASM). Here is how the ASM describes the coat color of Northern short-tailed shrews (okay, I found this poetic, hope you do too!):
"sooty-plumbeous above, ashy plumbeous below, varying with the light"
From notes on
Blarina brevicauda from the
NatureServe Explorer:
Food Comments: Eats earthworms, slugs, snails, insect larvae, millipedes, other invertebrates, and small vertebrates (especially mice in winter). May hoard food (especially snails).I wanted more information about these spectacular shrews. Especially, how their poisons are delivered and how they work.
Bone Clones offers elephant shrews and tree shrews, but alas, no Northern short-tailed. They
do have a seven-foot tall reproduction of the skull and neck vertebrae of a giraffe. Just shy of two grand, mounted on a stand. Not too much cheaper, you can get the giraffe head and neck dis-articulated and without stand. Nevermind the whole giraffe, seven feet of profile is plenty, eh?
The Bone Clones site also offers forensic and comparative anatomy models. These do not come cheap either. For example, you could snap up a
Fetal oranguatan for $395. Who on earth is seeking facsimiles of fetal orangutans, enough so that they are commercially available? Well, they are and I must be damn stupid. But dang, Bone Clones have no
B. brevicauda whatsoever.
Okay, getting over this, but Northern short-tailed shrews, aka mole shrews, have some kind of funky poison spit going on...and everything about them is pretty fascinating. They do not hibernate. They communicate and observe through echolocation. Cool and then cooler!
Mammals of Wisconsin ( I am reading the print version, but it is also available online) includes quoted material from
former-President Theodore Roosevelt on the habits and behavior of the "mole shrew". What? Love that former-President TR is off conducting weird experiments on natural history, especially those involving shrews. Bill Clinton is no way near as inspirational,
love that Teddy R. was observing and recording data on
B. brevicauda. Don't you, too?
The
Shrew (ist) Site is a fantastic web presence, a "shrew shrine" of interesting links and discussion of all things shrewish. Obviously, there are others out there who know and appreciate the shrew in ways far deeper than your laundress and her cats!
Anyhow, the fact that shrews get to eat 43% of their weight, just to maintain themselves, has left me dumbfounded. For I am on forever on a diet and, more recently, badly wearing compression garments yet again. Besides that, guess I am truly sucky at blogging. But hey, like the pugnacious Siamese, I am out here, doing my thing. Say howdy, tell me your feral cat and/or shrew tales.
Best to all!
tl
Have been feeling kind of low, myself, lately.
