Table of Contents 1.

Among the smallest hairy creatures to be found in Britain, the shrew has an energetically twitching nose and feisty reputation. Closely related to the hedgehog and mole, they have tiny eyes and ears but a keen sense of smell. Found almost worldwide, apart from the frozen poles and they are also absent from Australasia and most of South America. Tiny and famously energetic, their ever-active snouts help them seek out small prey in the leaf litter, from tropical forests to open grassland, actively hunting for insects and worms. Along with anything else they can find. Some shrews can even hunt beneath snow or under water.

Here, on the mainland of Britain, we have three different species, Common, Pygmy and the Water Shrew. Yet on islands in the English Channel, only continental shrews can be found. In 1982, while filming a BBC documentary on St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly, I accidentally discovered a shrew emitting ultrasonic sound. Something previously unknown. A visiting wildlife expert had a new electronic bat detector in her pocket. Much to our surprise, it suddenly began shrieking. Earlier that morning I had been out collecting seaweed to identify and had left the pile in a glass tank, secure in the cool of our entrance hall. But as the bat expert passed close by, the culprit for the piercing sound was soon identified peering out of the still damp weed – a Lesser White Toothed Shrew.

The following day using the bat detector enabled me to find others to film. They were hunting for sandhoppers along the stand line, left like ribbons on a sandy shore. Other shrews were found hiding among wave worn boulders and sea smoothed pebbles at the back of the beach. Perhaps this is the explanation for their original distribution centuries ago, hiding among cargo waiting for shipping somewhere to a distant shore.

Andrew Cooper