A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
shrew
A shrew is a very small long-nosed insectivorous mammal with a metabolism that will not let it stop. It must eat something close to its own body weight every day and starves within hours if it does not, so it is active in bursts around the clock, day and night, summer and winter, and never hibernates. Several species have venomous saliva and one can echolocate at short range.
Etymology
The word is Old English for the animal and it has an unusually dark history. Shrews were believed to be venomous and malignant, and a shrew-struck animal or person was one that had been walked over by one, treated by passing them through a hole in a shrew ash, a tree with a live shrew sealed into it. The human sense, meaning a scolding person, comes from the same belief and is on record from the thirteenth century.
Notes
The Etruscan shrew is among the smallest mammals in the world at under two grams, with a heart rate around 1,500 beats a minute. Several shrews shrink their own skulls and brains by up to twenty percent going into winter and regrow them in spring, which is called Dehnel’s phenomenon and which is one of the more startling things a vertebrate has been found to do.