A SHREWISH MYSTERY.
An inquiry about an old mystery reaches me from a York- shire rector : " How is it that I find so many dead shrews on my garden paths, not worried or disfigured in any way, and, I may add, the owl is my nightly visitor " ? First, it is generally granted that the shrews are not a favourite prey, though I happen to know that barndoor *owls will devour them. But shrews, in spite of their minuteness, prey rather-than are preyed on. The last dead one I found had the feathers of a greenfinch in its marauding jaws. Almost every country- man has at one time or another found dead shrews ;- and how rarely we find the dead of any other animal, unless it has come to a violent death ! The birds when death approaches retire to some hidden place. So do nearly all the vermin ; but the shrews seem to select for a death-bed the most open and frequented place they can find. No one, I think; has ever quite explained the . mystery. It is possible that they are often killed in the open by cats or birds of prey, who mistake them for mice and, finding their mistake, drop the unsavoury booty. One theory is that they indulge in bouts of migratiop, and we find in autumn those that have fallen out of the forced marches. But singularly little is known of
the life-history either of the shrew mouse or the two species of water shrew. • •
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