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365 Urban species. #321: Eastern Chipmunk

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What makes one rodent cute and another rodent vermin? A furry, rather than scaly tail? Stripes? Cheek pouches? I submit that it is merely context. In the forest, a rodent is an adorable sprite, dashing about gathering nuts. If you are the steward of a collection of captive animals, rodents are filthy thieves, taking food and leaving crap. This sums up my attitude toward chipmunks.
Until fairly recently, I did not consider chipmunks to be urban animals. But once I began to frequent the southern edges of The Emerald Necklace in Boson, my opinion changed. Olmsted Park and Franklin Park are both bristling with chipmunks. They seem to need a fair amount of forest, especially but not exclusively oak forest, and that needs to be messy forest, with rocks and logs for cover. They also need a good stretch of soil (not concrete and asphalt) in which to construct their burrows. Gray squirrels are more common in cities, since they need only the trees as refuge--soil, it seems, is a more rare commodity. Their burrows are where they dart when alarmed, and they are often alarmed. Small mammals survive by being cautious, if not downright twitchy. The burrows are also where they construct their larders of stored acorns and beech nuts. When they aren't eating plant material, they are surprisingly predatory, eating insects, salamanders, and even mice.
Like many rodents, chipmunks are opportunistic, and given access to a food source, they will enter homes and other buildings. As alluded to earlier, one of their favorite haunts is the city zoo.
Here's where I ask you to post your chipmunk pictures in the comments.
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We used to have oodles of Malaysian Palm Squirrels at the Perth Zoo, running free- they bred into the thousands, did their best to eat all the other animals' food and invaded homes around the zoo, so the Zoo exterminated all of them about 5 years ago...
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we have chippies living under our steps - they dug tunnels for such. i don't very much some of these guys even go into the woods. they like the paradise of the apt complex. they LOVE maple seeds. they'll also quite happily forage in the dumpster, on fallen food, peanuts, whatever. it's kinda of cute to watch them zone out in a sunbeam and not move. you can almost poke them with your toe :)
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I'm much more careful of where I put my hand now. All that silly child needed was a healthy respect for nature. Learned my lesson!
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He was depositing his seeds in her mini-pocket to save for the winter.
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chipmunks often raid each others' stashes, so chipmunks usually have several back-up ones.
in new england forests, chipmunk density is higher near old stone walls.
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We stared at if for a while and realized that those peanuts they were eating had beaks... My research tells me that it's by Sir Edward Henry Landseer (1802-1873) and the site that told me that innocently described the print as, "It depicts two squirrels communing with a song bird." Another site has the title of the print as "A Piper and Pair of Nutcrackers" and a date of 1864.
When we bought it and pointed out to the clerks what the print was, they gave us rather strange looks.
There's also a movie out there on Youtube of a chipmunk eating a mouse and running around with the mouse dangling from the chipmunk's maw. Just found it again here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qSEkFpZJXk).
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I had heard that chipmunks eat the heads of mice like they were acorns, and it's great that there is video evidence of it!