"They're the loveliest, oddest little things, and they used to be all over the garden," he said. "Never see one now. Maybe it is just that I am not as observant as I was, or maybe the cats got them all. I am talking of shrews, of course. I used to think they were the common shrew but David Cabot, in his recent big book Ireland: A Natural History tells us that they are pigmy shrews, and are ubiquitous in Ireland, turning up even on remote offshore islands. They eat mostly woodlice, beetles, small flies and other insects. All shrews need to eat a lot. Our pigmy shrews, for example, have to eat 25 per cent more than their own body weight every day to keep them going. If you are 12 stone, you would, in comparison have to eat. . .but that's ridiculous. According to number 81 in the series Wildlife in Britain, if a pigmy shrew fails to eat for more than two hours it will die. And, they tell us, a pigmy heart beats up to 250 times a minute." Most of those seen by our friend were dead, brought in by cats - "but occasionally, if you were, say, planting a tree in a place where last years dead leaves still lay on the ground or even around the compost heap which was largely of dead leaves, anyway, you might see one running along. So they may still be there in spite of the cats" - not ours, he says, which are well fed anyway.
The same publication says our pigmy weighs 3 to 6 grammes and is, head and body, 40 to 60 mm, while the tail is 3545 mm. Body, then, shorter than your thumb. A friend, by the way, living on the outer southern suburbs of Dublin, says that her cats regularly bring offerings of dead mice and shrews. The Collins Field Guide to Mammals tells us their maximum lifespan is 16 months. Usually 13. About 20 per cent of those born, apparently, will survive to breed.
Gilbert White of Shelborne tells of a custom of earlier times when people attributed injury or pain in cattle to the fact that a shrew (they called it a shrew-mouse) had run over the part affected. So they bored a hole in an ash tree with an augur, and "a poor devoted shrewmouse was thrust in alive and plugged in." From then on the twigs of the tree were applied to the affected part of the cattle as a curative. Long before White's time (he lived 1720 to 1793). Irrelevantly, he mentions in the same chapter that in 1751 in Hertfordshire two suspected witches were drowned in a horse pond.