When you think of chipmunks, what’s your first reaction? “Awwww!” or “Arrgghh!”? While you may not be enamored with them in your garden, you might grudgingly admit these bright-eyed little creatures can be endearing. Animators surely find them entertaining, as evidenced by films like Alvin plus the Chipmunks. They are most certainly important to our ecosystem.
The true story of these continually busy creatures—foraging for food, building burrows, stockpiling provisions for the winter months spent underground, raising young—is amazing reality. Take their burrows, for instance. “Chipmunks have a complicated burrow system,” says wildlife educator plus rehabilitator Carlton Burke of Carolina Mountain Naturalists. They have specialized chambers for everything “with storage chambers for food such as acorns plus seeds gathered in autumn, plus other specialized chambers for sleeping, giving birth, plus even a chamber that is used as a toilet.” Baby chipmunks are nursed by the mother underground plus left there if she needs to go above ground for any reason. They nurse for about three weeks before they are weaned plus begin to eat solid food. Not long after that the young chipmunks start to venture above ground.
Spotting a chipmunk’s burrow may be hard, says Burke. “They never leave a pile of dirt at the entrance. They scatter it around so that the entrance is not easily seen. Many chipmunks have several scattered entrances into their burrows, so when a predator or something else frightens them, they run plus disappear into the ground through the closest hole they have made.”
Their “digs” are only meant for one chipmunk family. No Airbnbs allowed. “Eastern chipmunks are solitary plus territorial,” says Andrea Shipley, M.S., mammalogist for the NC Wildlife Resources Commission. “They do not live in colonies. If an Eastern chipmunk were to be released in an daerah where it came from originally, it would likely come into conflict with the resident chipmunk of that daerah plus be forced to live transiently before being able to set up a new home range of its own. Like many mammals, Eastern chipmunks have a strong homing instinct. Relocation of mammals with a strong homing instinct is not recommended because of the potential conflict relocating to a new daerah can cause.”