Meet this mysterious little creature: Did you know that the Sicilian shrew is also Maltese?
The name given to the Sicilian shrew - a small mammal found in shrub land - is a misnomer. The small animal is actually indigenous to Malta! Actually, even the name Maltese shrew would be a misnomer since, of the four subspecies of this Crocidura Sicula, the only one that exists on the Maltese islands lives only on Gozo. Meet Crocidura Sicula ssp. Calypso.
Known in Maltese as il-gurdien ta’ geddumu twil (loosely translated as the “long-chinned mouse”), it possesses several particular characteristics. First of all, it is not a mouse at all. Shrews are smaller and their tails are shorter and furrier. Also, their noses are more pointed (hence the reference to a long chin?) and their eyes and ears are smaller. Perhaps less noticeable is that they have pointier teeth too.
We may pardon all the mix-ups because this little guy is not easy to come by. He’s small and not easy to see at night: the nocturnal creature is light gray in colour (with a well-defined pale belly), just 10-12 cm long, including the tail, and weighs just 4 to 9 grams.
Anyway, he’d definitely smell you approaching before he sees you coming; his sensitive whiskers will twitch and his little legs will scurry. Otherwise, after filling his belly with insects, worms or lizard carcasses, the cute predator will snooze it off in a sheltered place in the garigue (scrubland) that’s his home. Let it be known that, in true Maltese style, the local shrew loves a good meal and eats about 50-60% of his body weight per day.
Indeed, it would seem that humans were never part of the story when it comes to the shrew: the shrews in Sicily and Gozo inhabited the islands before humans did.
In 1990, P Vogel, PJ Schembri, M Borg and J Sultana published an article in the Journal of Mammalian Studies (Zeitschrift fur Säugetierkunde, 55-1, 357-359) about how the Gozitan shrew is a probable, and rather unique survivor, of the Pleistocene fauna of Mediterranean islands. Please note that this is no small thing: the Pleistocene is the ice age period which lasted from about 2.5 million to 11.5 million years ago!
And while many of the Pleistocene species had became extinct during the Neolithic period, this little guy survived and thrived.
Now that’s a wise, old shrew! How ever did we miss him all this time?