Election Section

Next time you hear someone rustling furtively in the bushes beside your house, just as night’s falling, check it out before you call the cops. It might be just me, frantically hunting snails to feed some shrews. 

I’m speaking of pigmy shrews—roughly speaking, the smallest mammal in the world. About the size of the top joint of your thumb, plus a tail as long. And much of that’s fur: a big one weighs less than two well-worn pennies. Though rather common in our woodlands, they’re so elusive that few people see them in the flesh, and fewer recognize them. I caught one hunting grass-spiders in a sunny meadow in springtime, took her home to show to the kids in school where I teach. She surprised us with four pups, and two survived—tempting me with visions of a breeding colony.  

Shrews are amazing. You’d expect that something that tiny, cute, and furry would like to be stroked, would cuddle in your hand, like a pet hampster. Not a chance. I could hardly lay a finger on one for an instant—not just because they darted about so rapidly, but because even pups raised in captivity are still genuinely wild. They can hardly see or smell, so it was easy to come close; but an instant of contact was long enough for one to turn, taste me, decide that I wasn’t food, and dash off to hunt elsewhere. Their only concession to domestication was to regard my hand as a vast inedible cloud, rather than an owl. 

Shrews move so fast because they live so fast. When a pigmy shrew takes a nap, its heart slows down to 800 beats a minute, and its metabolism comes almost to a standstill, burning energy only 35 times as fast as a resting human does. You’d have to digest a full meal every fifteen minutes, day and night, to keep up even with that. If you had to spend energy getting your food too—well, you burn about 800 calories an hour when you’re running, but a shrew your size would burn 160,000 calories an hour, or about two and a half meals a minute, if it could find them. So of course shrews hunt constantly, around the clock, pausing to nap every 20 minutes or so. And they eat a lot of snails. 

They’d rather have smaller, livelier prey. But three shrews can consume a thousand sowbugs a day, impossible to supply. A five-buck bag of crickets from the pet-store disappears like a bowl of popcorn set before teenagers. I thought about turning the back yard into a worm farm, But mainly, I made do with snails. Indeed, they’re an ideal food, plump, juicy, often bigger than a shrew—and, you might think, in infinite supply. 

Well, think again. There’s nothing like having to provide, to make one learn to count. I fed my three tiny carnivores four snails every six hours, around the clock. (Shrews carry no fat, and starve to death if left hungry overnight.) That’s sixteen snails a day, plus a weekly sprinkling of oatmeal—which added up to 500 full-grown snails a month, or 2,000 young ones. Whichever I supplied, it amounted to five and a half pounds of snails a month, or four pounds shelled. Month after month. 

Our own garden held but a week’s-worth of snails, and the neighbors’ were quickly exhausted. So I took to prowling the streets, or rather the pleasant sidewalks of Berkeley’s flatlands, with my gallon zip-lock baggie in hand, rummaging through curbside plantings and floral borders, poking into neglected vegetation beside houses and driveways, exploring the modest front gardens of this cosmopolitan town, rich with plants from around the world. 

Mostly I roamed with my son Jaime, an avid hunter, going on five. Being with a child is a passport, gives one permission for all kinds of reasonable activities that might seem foolish or daft for an unaccompanied adult. Perhaps I exploited him, but we both enjoyed it. It’s rare that an urban child gets a chance to be a real hunter and provider. And it was good for him to be involved in community service at a tender age, purging pests and providing benign entertainment for the folks who caught our act.  

We followed the usual courtesies, of course, asking permission before we probed too deeply into a garden, offering to service back yards, replacing all rocks. No one ever said no, though some were nonplussed. We didn’t quite have the cheek to announce ourselves as the Good Fairies of Snailocide, here to grant your fantasy of a pure garden and something useful to be done with all that meat. But there was no doubt about it: Anyone who cares for the mythical fauna of this mythical town could spot us as a native species. 

As for the actual fauna, a prolonged hunt for snails is a serious enterprise, a field-study in natural history. As hunters and scientists both, we studied our prey, its habitat, and their relations. Jaime learned a lot about local ecology, and so did I—for as we ranged wider afield, trekking to more distant neighborhoods and stopping the car for spot-checks all over town, our quest gave me a somewhat systematic survey of what’s been happening to the humbler creatures of our community. The details of my observations were too rich, and the conclusions too depressing, to deal with here. But what I learned about snails, as a predator, boils down to this: There weren’t really very many in town anymore. 

To anyone who’s fought them, this may seem a lunatic assertion. But you get a different perspective when you’re looking for something you want, rather than trying to rid yourself of a plague. And this is how the snail situation seemed from the streets, bearing in mind that we didn’t sample the back yards. Over the previous thirty years, their habitats had shrunk and changed, and their food supplies too; and systematic poisoning had reduced and isolated their remnant populations.  

The result, in practical terms, was that if you wanted more than a few snails, you really had to hunt for them. Each neighborhood still had its own scattered “ hot spots” where snails clustered, but often we walked for blocks without finding one. There are only three or four common ornamental plants in Berkeley that snails really like to eat, and two environments in which they thrive. These plants and environments had grown rarer during the previous decade; and when we did find them, they were usually barren of snails, often for so long that the tell-tale traces of disintegrating snail-bait, and even the empty shells, were gone. 

Mind you, we were after volume. It wasn’t worth our while to spend ten minutes inspecting a front border, with the light failing and our stomachs growling and the shrews nipping at each other in the cage back home, and come up with a lousy juvenile or two. We needed meat, right away. It was hardly worth stopping for less than 25 big ones. 

So I became in effect an extension of the shrews, a shrew of sorts myself, especially when abroad without my young—scurrying impatiently from one sidewalk garden to another, hardly pausing to whisk my hand under a choice leaf or behind the best rock, before deciding that it was fruitless and bounding on. Like a shrew, when I did find a bountiful place I ransacked it quickly and thoroughly, piling up my prey, bringing them back home to store alive in the larder, against the chance that my next hunt would find slim pickings.  

As the larder was our front garden, after eight months it was quite ravaged, though the shrews were so cute that I hardly cared. Our garden would doubtless be snail heaven still, if someone had not left the shrews’ cage-top ajar with an outside door open, sabotaging my hope for a breeding colony. I never saw them again, but as the sowbug and snail counts in my borders wax and wane, I imagine their descendants still at work.  

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