Recently I received a note from a reader with a question about chipmunks.

He’s seeing lots of fox, gray, black and red squirrels but he hasn’t seen a chipmunk in several months. He wonders why the other squirrels are so plentiful while the chipmunks seem to be totally absent. An interesting side point he perhaps inadvertently makes is that chipmunks are a member in good standing of the squirrel family even though they more closely resemble gophers and ground squirrels which are more distant cousins.

The answer to his question is that they have retired underground for the winter. However, they don’t hibernate like woodchucks where their systems almost fully shut down and they are truly zonked out for months on end. A chipmunk’s metabolism slows and they snooze a lot but they routinely move around in their burrows and eat from their underground food caches. It’s their well stocked (hopefully) food caches that allow them to pull this off. The other squirrels bury a few nuts around and stash away some food in a tree cavity or hollow stump for an easy snack but it’s just a hobby.

A chipmunk’s seemingly sole mission in life is to store food. All summer long they race to and fro, filling their cheek pouches with seeds, nuts, berries, mushrooms and most anything else edible and carrying it back to their burrows. It’s this relentless activity that gets them in trouble when they zero in on our gardens. Other animals eat their fill of certain delectables and move on but a chipmunk with his zealous work ethic can transfer much of a garden from your possession to his in short order. Classic redistribution of wealth.  Geico has their gecko, certain politicians should have their chipmunk.

You’ve surely wondered about those small animal holes you see with no sign of dirt or any other construction.  What creature can dig a hole without leaving any dirt around? We know the distinct mounds made by moles and crayfish. Woodchuck, marmot and prairie dog burrows are easily identified by the tell-tale earth mountains.

The various gophers and ground squirrels all leave dirt mounds.  Most of those dirt free, nearly invisible holes can be attributed to the canny chipmunk. When you’re at the bottom of the food chain it pays to be smart. A typical chipmunk burrow is long and complex. They’re usually twenty to thirty feet long with a nesting chamber, several food cache chambers and a number of offshoot escape tunnels. Amazingly, the chipmunk carries off every grain of excavated dirt in its cheek pouches and deposits it elsewhere. Constructing a burrow must be a traumatic event for I’m guessing he can’t spit for weeks afterward.

They usually locate their burrows under concealing brush, rock piles, stumps or building foundations. They are solitary and a typical home range is around a half acre.  Good habitat typically has about four chipmunks per acre so their home ranges often overlap. The territory, which they vigorously defend from other chipmunks extends about 50 feet out from their main burrow entrance.

Chipmunks can climb trees but seldom do. They much prefer their feet on good old terra firma. There is one species in northern Asia but all the rest are here in North America.

The species throughout the eastern U.S. is the eastern chipmunk (imagine that).

Several other species appear farther to the west. Here in Michigan we are at the eastern edge of the least chipmunk’s range so we have them both. The least chipmunk is noticeably smaller than the eastern and the tail is comparatively longer. With the eastern the distinctive chipmunk striping down the back ends at the rump. The least chipmunk’s stripes extend over the rump to the base of the tail. Chipmunks are distinguished from gophers and other ground squirrels by the stripes on their face, which none of the others have. So, no worries Bill, your perky chipmunks will be back next spring.

Carpe diem.

Larry Lyons writes a weekly outdoor column for Leader Publications. He can be reached at larrylyons@verizon.net