The Naming of the Shrew

Illustration: Glenn Wolff © 2011

In the beginning was the word, and it’s a good thing, because above all else we are creatures of language. Adam’s first act was to name the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, and in so defining the things of the world he made it come alive. Little wonder, then, that we are obsessed with giving names to everything we can see and touch and imagine. It’s probably our best trick.

Which might explain why, since childhood, one of my favorite rainy-day pastimes has been to browse on animal names. My life-list of nomenclature includes some exotics we’ll get to, but I keep coming back to the shrew. The word, first of all, is fun to say. Pronounce it slowly, with feeling, and you can’t help forming the face you would make if you happened to bite into one. Predators avoid shrews because the glands on their flanks secrete a nasty-smelling musk that makes them bitter to the tongue. Scrunch up your face and say it: “Shrew!” The word isn’t so much spoken as expelled.

Few people observe shrews up close, not because shrews are rare (they’re quite common), but because they’re usually nocturnal, are very small – two to four inches on average — and are almost too shy to live. As you’re driving at night you might occasionally see one darting in manic dashes across the road in front of you: a hyperactive bundle of indecision, scampering first one way, then another, then streaking across the pavement so fast you’re breathless with sympathy for such a tightly wound package of nerves. If ever a mammal needed to take a deep breath and relax, this is it.

By any standard, shrews are damned strange animals. Their metabolism operates at full-tilt boogie every moment of their lives, but when frightened their hearts can accelerate to a rate of 1,200 beats a minute, about twice that of a hummingbird’s heart.

To maintain their frenetic metabolism, shrews must eat nearly all the time, so they can’t afford to be choosy and will consume just about anything they find, including earthworms, spiders, centipedes, snails, slugs, insect larvae, lizards, frogs, fish, nuts, seeds, plants, and any mammals and birds small enough or slow enough to be overpowered. Shrews have poor eyesight and hunt seemingly at random, zigzagging across the ground until they blunder into something edible. Some species have a taste for carrion and like to burrow into the brain first. Others, if they can’t find anything else to eat, will curl up, lock their hind legs with their forelegs, and snack on their own feces as they defecate.

Some mother shrews and their young travel in caravan, each animal biting the fur on the rump of the one ahead of it to stay in touch, making them look like a string of furry frankfurters undulating along the ground. If threatened, shrews are likely to rise on their hind legs, bare their teeth, and emit a squeaky warning cry. Like bats, they probably use echolocation to get around in the dark. Some swim and dive as adroitly as tiny otters; others are equipped with fringes of hair around their feet that allow them to scamper across the surface of ponds and streams. Still others spend most of their lives in trees. One species, the Sichuan burrowing shrew, appears to live almost entirely underground.

Naturally, such odd creatures are magnets for superstition. Shrews for a long time were thought to be so poisonous that they could sicken farm animals just by crossing paths with them. In Europe it was believed for centuries that the bite of a shrew was venomous, a notion carried to the New World despite experts’ assurances to the contrary. Folklore, they said. Old wives’ tales. Until some skeptical American biologist picked up a short-tailed shrew and it sank its teeth into his finger, pumped venom into the wound, and left the biologist a howling believer. It turns out that the short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda,  is the only venomous mammal in North America. Found from southern Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia in the north, and central Nebraska to central Georgia in the south, it packs poison powerful enough to kill a full-grown rabbit, though the ordinary dose is just enough to paralyze a field mouse or cause pain in a human for several days.

The European water shrew also produces venom, with which it subdues fish, frogs, and aquatic larvae while hunting underwater.In his book Et Cetera, Et Cetera, the biologist Lewis Thomas traced the origin of the word “shrew” to an ancient Indo-European root, skreu, which served as a verb, meaning to cut something up, and as a noun, for the tool used for such cutting. Later, in Old English, it became the noun screawa, and was awarded to the mammal we now call the shrew, perhaps because it is such a vicious little butcher of prey. In time the word morphed into the Middle English verb “to shrew,” which meant simply to curse, inevitably evolving into the adjective “shrewd,” meaning “bad, keen, or piercing.” A shrewd or shrewish person was deceitful and nagging, and prone to violent temper tantrums and foul speech, although by the time of the Elizabethans the epithet had softened somewhat. Quick-witted Kate in The Taming of the Shrew was an easily recognized character type in Shakespeare’s England, feisty and free-spirited, at a time when to be called a shrew could be either a compliment or an insult (thus the audience of Much Ado About Nothing knew, as we do today, that to be “shrewd of tongue” was to be spiteful, severe, malicious, and clever). These days nobody likes to be called a shrew, but shrewdness in courtrooms and negotiating sessions earns our grudging admiration.

A word like “shrew” fits its namesake well, but we’re not always so practical with our naming. Because we get pleasure from the trill of syllables and the cadence of consonants, we often choose names because they are the audible equivalent of flowers in blossom. Is there a correlation between our words and our notions of beauty? Of course. How else explain the gorgeous names we’ve bestowed upon butterflies and birds, and the dull ones with which we’ve burdened bats and reptiles? We’ll now and then deign to offer an interesting name to a bat – the Little Flying Cow, for instance, for a small African nectar feeder; and the ghostly white Ghost Bats of Central and South America; and the African Butterfly Bats, which resemble moths and butterflies with their spots, stripes, and fluttering flight – but those are the exceptional names in an order that includes a thousand blandly labeled species. Surely it is indicative of our ambivalent attitudes toward bats that the two most common species in North America are called the Little Brown Bat and the Big Brown Bat.

Among reptiles and amphibians, beautiful names are as rare as beautiful faces, but a little digging in the literature uncovers such alliterative gems as the Longnose Leopard Lizard and the Savannah Slimy Salamander. And who can resist the Bluetail Mole Skink? Or the Rusty-Rumped Whiptail? Or the Redstripe Ribbon Snake?

The names we’ve given some marine animals sound like characters in children’s books. The Notable Rattail and Southern Gobbleguts would make deliciously nasty villains. Ovate Silverbiddy and Precious Wentletrap are surely someone’s eccentric maiden aunts. What kid wouldn’t like to be friends with a Harlequin Sweetlips or a Bicolor Dottyback? Who wouldn’t be charmed by a Lollipop Shark or a Rose Petal Bubble Shell or a Honeyhead Damsel? Who doesn’t feel some sympathy for the Depressed Gorgonian Crab?

Most freshwater fish are named less imaginatively than their saltwater cousins, but a few stand out, including the Stargazing Minnow, Virgin Spinedace, Bluefin Stoneroller, Warpaint Shiner, Flannelmouth Carpsucker, Sharpfin Chubsucker, Suckermouth Redhorse, Bigeye Jumprock, Stippled Studfish, Rainwater Killifish, and Frecklebelly Madtom.

Of course we’ve revealed our passion for language most extravagantly with birds. We might not have the opportunity to see them in the wild, but we can enjoy nominally the Fan-Tailed Berrypicker, Tink-tink Cisticola, Ruddy Turnstone, Willie Wagtail, and White-crested Laughing-thrush. Dr. Seuss might have named the Greater Racket-Tailed Drongo, the Pale-breasted Thrush-babbler, and the Yellow-Rumped Tinkerbird. The Bearded Helmetcrest sounds like an obscure accessory to medieval armor. The Variable Seedeater might be a garden tool manufactured by Black and Decker.

Entertaining as those names can be, they don’t carry a lot of weight among scientists, for whom precision usually has to take precedence over poetry. The vernacular creates local color, but it also creates confusion. A biologist needs to know that the American Woodcock he studies in Maine is the same bird that elsewhere in North America is known as Timberdoodle, Bogsucker, Woodhen, Big Eye, Midnight Rider, Whistledoodle, Labrador Twister, Night Partridge, and Mudsnipe.

Our tendency to invent local names underscores the need for  reliable and universal systems of organization. Naturalists since Aristotle have tried to shoehorn plants and animals into a variety of often whimsical systems.  One system ranked animals by their level of nobility, with lions and eagles at the top of the heap. Others began with domestic animals and proceeded to wild ones, or from smallest creatures to largest. Early Anglo-Saxon naturalists relied on a system based on modes of locomotion, in which, for example, all snakes, nightcrawlers, intestinal parasites, and dragons were classified as worms, because they were “creeping things.” A habitat-based system in the 17th century made the beaver kin to the fishes, simply because both lived in water. A remnant of that concept lingered as late as the 1930s, when muskrats in northern Ohio and elsewhere were granted papal classification as fishes, so that they could be eaten on Catholic fast days. It lingers in our vernacular to this day, which is why we are so cavalier about designating certain aquatic organisms as “fish” when they are clearly not fish: starfish, crayfish, shellfish.

The binomial classification in use throughout the world today, whereby Latin or Latinized words designate the genus and species of every living thing, was invented by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) and soon made all previous systems obsolete. Plants had traditionally been grouped into general categories based on characteristics such as size – “shrubs” and “trees,” for instance – but Linnaeus created greater precision by identifying plants according to their sexual characteristics. Class and order were determined by the number of stamens and pistils. Genus described a general structure, such as the anatomy of a fruit or flower. Species referred to easily identified features such as its taste or the shape of its leaves.

Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae was a vast improvement over previous systems that had sometimes been ridiculously complicated. Before Linnaeus, one butterfly had been given the unwieldy Latin name Papilio media alis pronis praefertim interioribus maculis oblongis argenteis perbelle depictus. A contemporary of Linnaeus’s, the French scientist Georges Buffon, persisted in grouping animals according to their familiarity, placing horses, donkeys, and cows together, for instance, and chickens with pigeons. But Linnaeus’s simple and logical system caught on and soon inspired a mania for naming, making it a mark of high honor – and a source of intense competition – to name a species after oneself or an acquaintance. Linnaeus himself honored a former teacher, Professor Olof Rudbeck, by granting the name Rudbeckia to the genus of flowers we know as coneflowers and black-eyed susan.

Linnaeus lived to see his system revolutionize taxonomy and allow scientists throughout the world to communicate about the vast numbers of new plants and animals that were being discovered. Eventually the American Woodcock was christened Scolopax minor and the Greater North American Short-tailed Shrew became Blarina brevicauda. The ancient Greek botanist Isodorus would have been pleased. It was he who said, “If you do not know the names, the knowledge of things is wasted.”

Walt Whitman, who had little interest in taxonomy, wrote in his sprawling memoir of nature-watching, Specimen Days and Collect, “You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness… helps your enjoyment of these things.” Whitman worried that words might get in the way of a pure appreciation of nature.

But words can be appreciated for their own sake as well. Without our passion for them, the sky would be crossed only by little gray birds and big black birds. We would admit little difference between an elk and a moose, between a skink and a snake, between trout and bullhead and bass. A beaver would be a rat would be a mouse would be a shrew. Which would be a shame, because a shrew is certainly not a mouse, and the world is much enriched by the difference.