Marshy areas and damp places are the habitat of the wandering shrew. Cattail and tule marshes, sphagnum bogs, and meadows are favored. They frequent streams through forests but rarely are taken in places away from water. On some of the San Juan Islands, wandering shrews were found along the beaches where they were feeding on the amphipods that live in the dead seaweed and litter at the high tide line. In a favorable habitat, wandering shrews may be the most abundant mammal present. Specimens are occasionally taken in 90 per cent or more of a mammal collector's traps. The preference of the wandering shrew for damp areas makes it more or less independent of life-zones, for marshy areas, whether in Transition, Canadian, or Upper Sonoran life-zones, present comparable ecological conditions. Broadbrooks (1939: 65) found that captives taken at Seattle ate rolled oats, apple, fresh or cooked meat, sow bugs, centipedes, earthworms, frogs (_Hyla regilla_), a salamander (_Plethodon vehiculum_), and small, black slugs (_Arean arean_). Wandering shrews proved incapable of destroying snails (_Helisoma occidentalis_) and large slugs. The captive shrews kept by Broadbrooks ate an average of 1.3 times their own weight in food each day. [Illustration: FIG. 29. Distribution of the wandering shrew in Washington. A. _Sorex vagrans vagrans._ B. _Sorex vagrans monticola._] The wandering shrew changes from winter to summer pelage in a few days, seemingly in the second week of October (Dalquest, 1944: 147). The spring molt occurs rapidly but perhaps at a less regular date. Rarely a midsummer molt occurs. The earliest evidence of breeding in a wandering shrew was discovered on January 27, 1937. Most adult females taken in February, March, April and May were pregnant. Embryos were less often found in summer and fall, but one pregnant female was taken in November. Embryos varied in number from 3 to 8 with an average of six. =Sorex vagrans vagrans= Baird _Sorex vagrans_ Baird, Rept. Pacific R. R. Survey, 8 (pt. 1):15, 1857. _Sorex suckleyi_ Baird, Rept. Pacific R. R. Survey, 8 (pt. 1):18, 1857 (type from Steilacoom Pierce County, Washington). _Type._--Obtained at Willapa Bay [Shoalwater Bay], Pacific County, Washington, by J. G. Cooper; entered in U. S. Nat. Mus. catalogue on October 23, 1856. _Racial characters._--Dark color. _Measurements._--Twenty-five males and 25 females from Seattle, King County, average, respectively: total length 110.5, 107; length of tail 44.6, 45; hind foot 12.4, 12.4. _Distribution._--This is the common marsh shrew of western Washington and occurs from the Pacific Ocean east to the Cascades at Lake Keechelus (W.S.M.) and 15 mi. NW White Salmon (Jackson, 1928: 106). =Sorex vagrans monticola= Merriam _Sorex monticolus_ Merriam, N. Amer. Fauna, 3:43, September 11, 1896.