The track of the raccoon is very distinctive and usually easy to find, because it frequents the mud by the water side. Sometimes, to a casual glance, the track of a small coon is taken for that of a large muskrat, but their differences are very obvious.
Like others of its kind, this mole is amazingly powerful in proportion to its size. It persistently adds to its surface ridges, and in constantly extending its deeper tunnels must dig loose earth and dispose of it by forcing it up through an outlet to form the mounds which mark the course of its travels. Where the soil is loose it readily forces it aside with its compact body and paddle-shaped hands. In pushing up the little piles of earth and in the ridges raised when burrowing close to the surface it sometimes injures meadows and other cultivated land. Occasionally it wanders away from the fields and invades lawns and gardens, where the only injury it does is in the disturbance of the soil.
Its nests are compact little balls of fine grass, weeds, or leaves in dry underground chambers excavated in its burrows. The nests are a foot or two underground, but above the level of the water, sometimes under a stump and again in a knoll or bank. One nest containing five young was found in Maryland in an old woodshed under several inches of chips. This location and its choice of a site for its nest under a stump in a field or in a dry knoll are clear indications of a kind of intelligence which even the lowliest animals appear to have in caring for their young.
The star-nosed mole is full of the restless energy so necessary in a mammal which must come across its food by more or less haphazard tunneling through the soil. It is active both summer and winter. In dry weather as the moisture near the surface decreases the soil hardens and earthworms and other subterranean life seek deeper levels. The mole follows them, only to return with them nearer the surface with a renewal of the moisture. In winter it sometimes comes out and travels slowly about on top of the snow, ready to burrow out of sight at once, however, at the sound of approaching footsteps.
The food of the star-nose, like that of most other moles, is made up mainly of earthworms, white grubs, cutworms, wireworms, and other underground insects. In captivity, before eating a worm or other flesh food offered, it first feels of it with the little raylike organs of touch on its nose. It is difficult to surmise the real value of these “feelers,” for it would seem that the acute sense of smell so common to mammals should do better service.
Aside from its disturbance of the surface soil by its ridges and mounds, the star-nosed mole does no direct injury, and its life is largely passed in the useful task of searching out and destroying insects. Indirectly it causes some injury to root crops, plants of various kinds, and fruit trees, by providing tunnels along which meadow and pine mice travel to commit the ravages which on circumstantial evidence are charged to the mole.
THE COMMON SHREW (Sorex personatus and its relatives)
(For illustration, [see page 566])
Many interesting small mammals are nocturnal or lead such obscure and hidden lives that they are rarely observed except by naturalists. Of these are the numerous species of shrews, which include the smallest mammals in the world. These tiny beasts all live among the vegetation and debris on the surface of the ground or in little burrows below. With the moles they are members of the order Insectivora and depend mainly on insects and meat for food. Despite their minute size, they are possessed of an indomitable courage and ferocity, which leads them without hesitation to attack and kill mice many times their own weight.
The genus Sorex, of which the common shrew is a member, is circumpolar in distribution, the various species ranging through England, the European mainland, Asia, and North America as far south as Guatemala.