So we (and by we, I mean Misteris) lifted the box and checked on our backyard shrews 12 days after we first discovered them.
The babies were all still there, but furry now and honestly pretty cute. They seemed in my expert completely clueless opinion to still be at least mostly blind. But we did see one of the babies venture out of the nest…sort of.
Artist and Boo were incredibly amused that while the rest of the babies were all doing their best to wiggle beneath each other and hide, one brave, or perhaps just mischievous, baby scampered out to go find their parents who were hiding under the portion of the box that Misteris didn’t lift up.
The parents must have refused to share their hiding spot, though, because a few moments later the baby crawled right back to the nest.
Our best guess is that the babies are now just under the 18-22 day mark since we’ve read that’s when they’re weaned and begin leaving the nest…which means the first time we saw them was likely within their first week of life.
Artist and Boo can.not.get.over their excitement about this. So basically I’m winning as a parent right now.
Misteris says he’s thinking about ways to set up a hospitable habitat for the shrews so that some of them might stay and continue having more babies and multiplying and basically causing me to step outside one day and find a horde of them pouring out from beneath the ground and terrifying me…or, according to him, just being cute and helping with the obscenely huge and disgusting slug population that we’re dealing with.
So, yeah…there’s that. We’ll see what ends up happening. God help us all. 😉