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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

Mount Lyell shrew

Image: https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_236362254...

Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Lyell_shrew

Thank you! I have no patience for articles headlined with “Picture of rare <blank> taken!” that do not lead with the picture. If I want to read more about it, I will, but lead with the damn image. I know I know, the whole point is to show me ads, etc. Still gonna fart my fart into the wind I guess.

That picture at the beginning is a high quality troll, I spent ages looking at it before I read the caption: "The team set up traps in vegetation areas like this one to capture Mount Lyell shrews."

Cute little critter!

Looking at that Wikipedia page, I didn't realize there were multiple "grading" systems for conservation risk. Interesting that two different systems have two different risk assessments for the same animal.

Shrews are cute but MEAN.

A few years ago we had a couple of feet of snow in a day. As I was snow blowing the driveway, I noticed all these little tunnels on the edge that was cut off by the side of the blower.

Then I saw a tiny little animal. I thought he was a mole. So I took my glove off and picked him up, as a good hillbilly would do.

That thing bit me like fifteen times up my thumb before I could react to yeet him across the yard.

Lesson learned.

That doesn’t sound mean. It sounds like you shouldn’t pick up a wild animal.

The shrew had to assume you were going to eat it, and it did what it needed to do to escape.

I think you cane safely assume he meant “fierce”. Or you know, insist on strict semantic meaning.

Didn't you ever watch "The Killer Shrews"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killer_Shrews

An MST3K favorite.

I had a northern short tailed shrew running around my basement. After luckily live catching it (and getting the correct id), I also discovered that they are mildly venomous. Go figure.

Wish it hadn't found a way into the house, as I would have liked to have it keep clearing pests out of my yard. It got dropped off else where quickly, after a snack.

>Shrews are cute but MEAN.

There is a reason that unpleasant women are called shrews[1], for example as in The Taming of the Shrew[2].

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shrew

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Shrew

Are these the same critters that squirls have been hunting and eating? Big thing about that with the squirls catching them, and killing them "with a bite to the neck" just like bigger preditors, and then chowing down.It was somewhere over California way, and there were researchers studying the systematic hunting by squirls, so these shrews days might be numbered, even after surviving extinction. I used to get $1 for a squirl tail when I was a kid, sold them at the store, and used the money for gas for boat and boxes of shells.....wonder what a shrew is worth:).kidding, kidding..ok half kidding....anybody actualy know?

Fyi, squirrels

The recent report was of some California squirrels eating voles.

Well yeah imagine some giant noisy machine digging you out and then trying to pick you up most likely to eat you.

You picked up a wild animal and it fought for its survival.

That's not evidence of being mean but alive and interested in staying that way.

I had a similar experience with a common squirrel that found its way into a friend's kitchen. It's a story about a stupid human treating a wild animal as his pet cat and getting holes in his hand in the process, not how squirrels are mean.

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