Measurements.—Thirty topotypes average: total length 122.5; length of tail 56.7; hind foot 14.3; weight 7.5 grams.
Distribution.—Known only from Destruction Island, 35 acres in area, lying 4 miles off the Washington Coast.
Sorex vagrans [Baird]
Wandering shrew
Description.—This species closely resembles the cinereous shrew in body form. Its head and body measure about 2-1/4 inches; the tail slightly less than 2 inches. In summer the upper parts are reddish brown and the underparts gray tinged with brownish. In winter the upper parts are more dusky.
Several races of the wandering shrew range over western North America from southwestern British Columbia south to southern Mexico. Two races occur in the state of Washington.
Marshy areas and damp places are the habitat of the wandering shrew. Cattail and tule marshes, sphagnum bogs, and meadows are favored. They frequent streams through forests but rarely are taken in places away from water. On some of the San Juan Islands, wandering shrews were found along the beaches where they were feeding on the amphipods that live in the dead seaweed and litter at the high tide line. In a favorable habitat, wandering shrews may be the most abundant mammal present. Specimens are occasionally taken in 90 per cent or more of a mammal collector's traps.
The preference of the wandering shrew for damp areas makes it more or less independent of life-zones, for marshy areas, whether in Transition, Canadian, or Upper Sonoran life-zones, present comparable ecological conditions.
Broadbrooks (1939: 65) found that captives taken at Seattle ate rolled oats, apple, fresh or cooked meat, sow bugs, centipedes, earthworms, frogs (Hyla regilla), a salamander (Plethodon vehiculum), and small, black slugs (Arean arean). Wandering shrews proved incapable of destroying snails (Helisoma occidentalis) and large slugs. The captive shrews kept by Broadbrooks ate an average of 1.3 times their own weight in food each day.
