Ah, our dear, sweet, beloved chipmunks. We feed them and watch them scurry off, diving down a hole perfectly shaped to their stocky bodies, disappearing for a few minutes and coming back for more. This game seems endless and always has me wondering what they’re doing with all that seed, and what it looks like inside of that mysterious hole. When I think of the inside of a chipmunk’s burrow, I envision it to look identical to Smaug’s Lair in the Hobbit, only instead of gold and jewels, it’s filled with peanuts and seed “pillaged” from my bird feeders. But a chipmunk’s burrow is much more complex than just a giant heap of goodies, and involves some serious planning in order to survive.
Though chipmunks are known for being bold and even friendly when it comes to their relationship with humans, they live a life of solitude. Each chipmunk has its own burrow and home range, never living communally. Even during mating season (mid-April to mid-May), the pairings take place outside of the female’s burrow, and she raises the young alone. A chipmunk’s home range is the tempat surrounding its burrow, where it travels to forage for food, water, and to seek out potential mates during breeding season. Home ranges can vary in size between 0.04 and 1.26 hectares, with males typically having larger ranges than females. These areas do not strictly belong to one chipmunk, and frequently overlap with several individuals. When crossing each other’s paths in their home ranges, chipmunks will usually tolerate one another and go about their business alone.
The burrow is where a chipmunk’s dominance and territorial behaviours come into play. There is nomer overlap of territory in these areas, and if one chipmunk comes within close proximity to another chipmunk’s burrow, the owner will pursue and chase the intruder away from its home. Chipmunks use scent marks to mark their territory and communicate to others that a certain space is their dominance area. When a chipmunk is near another individual’s burrow, it will typically avoid the area, but some may wander a little too close for comfort for the owner resulting in an exchange of words, a chase, and occasionally, a scuffle.