Eastern Chipmunk

I’ve been debating what I want to write about this weekend. I have stockpiles of photos, some recent, some not, sitting in my “to be sorted” file folder that I’ve sifted through indecisively a few times this weekend. Nothing was grabbing me. There were several perfectly interesting subjects there, which I was quite intrigued by when I took the photos, but nothing that really spoke to me today. Purely in the metaphorical sense, of course; photos don’t actually speak to me unless I’m completely intoxicated on chocolate.

So I waffled, and took an extra day to think about it. Then this afternoon, I peeked out the window while I waited for my tea to steep, and underneath the feeders was a chipmunk. I’d actually seen this guy, or I presume it was the same guy, early last week, but I’d been in my car about to head off to my parents’, and my camera was packed away. It’s not like he was going anywhere. Still, I’d been pleased to see him (or her) there – it’s a sign that spring is near. Although chipmunks aren’t true hibernators – they enter a state of torpor and rouse from time to time when the weather is slightly milder to feed from the stores of food they built up in the fall – we haven’t seen one at the feeders (or anywhere else here) since before the snow fell. I think he’s got a nest somewhere under the old cabin (now storage shed), as we usually see him near there. In an ordinary forest situation they use burrows that they dig underground, but I have a feeling that this guy may have decided to save himself some time and created himself a cozy space underneath the floorboards of the century-old building.

He was doing well for himself under the feeders. The Red Squirrels have figured out to jump from the lilac bush onto the feeder platform, but the chipmunk prefers to keep his feet on the ground. Still, there was enough dropped or discarded seed down there to fill out his cheek pouch quite nicely. Each pouch can hold as many as 35 sunflower seeds, and obviously considerably more of the smaller millet, which is probably what he was picking up since the chickadees and other feeder visitors would dig through the millet for the sunflower. This allows them to carry quite a bit back to the burrow for storage when they find an abundant food source. They push it back out of their cheeks from the outside using their paws, like you might squeeze a tube of toothpaste.

So I was watching this little guy gathering seeds under the feeder when he turned around and faced the other direction. And I was shocked to see that he was missing virtually the entire left side of his face. I actually had to grab my binoculars to have a closer look. His face was so badly damaged that he was unable to use that cheek pouch, which accounts for why the one on the other side was crammed fit to burst. He has no left eye, just a slight depression where one once was. At points I thought I saw a seed fall from the side of his face and wondered if he was missing part of his cheek, although I can’t be sure it wasn’t one that had gotten stuck to the wound when he was pushing his nose around in the seed litter. I couldn’t tell how fresh the wound was. It wasn’t bleeding, didn’t look red or raw or leaking pus. It was hard to tell if he was in any pain, but he didn’t seem to be trying to avoid touching it, his behaviour was normal.

This sort of injury is most likely to result from an encounter with a predator, but I don’t know what might have done the damage. Hawk? Fox? Fisher? Snake? And how did one side of the face get damaged while the other side appears to have remained unscathed? Or the rest of his body, for that matter. So then I wondered if it might be an infection. Will mange destroy the eye like that? Some sort of flesh-eating bacteria, perhaps? Do wild animals get that? Should I be concerned for our other feeder-visitors, or for Raven? Or could it even maybe be a birth defect of some sort?

It doesn’t seem to have unduly affected him, in any case. He seems healthy enough. He didn’t look unusually thin, and he was clearly finding enough food (presumably also eating it) under our feeders. He was alert and active, dashing off to the cover of the lilac bush when the birds took flight, moving around at a normal pace. Presumably it would affect his depth perception, but it didn’t seem to be an issue at least during the time I was watching. I’ll have to keep an eye out for him this spring and see if he sticks around, and how he does. He won’t be hard to identify, anyway.

The name in the post title, incidentally, is after legendary myrmycologist Edward O. Wilson, who was blinded in one eye as a child during a fishing accident. It was this reduced vision that led him to study insects, which were easier to observe than mammals or birds. He actually started on flies, but when mounting pins became scarce during WWII he switched to ants, which could be stored in vials. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I haven’t featured a wild mammal here in quite a while (white horses and new pets count as mammals but it’s a long time since they’ve been wild). Certainly the last wild mammal I remember writing about was the opossum that visited my parents’ feeders last winter. Perhaps not coincidentally, today’s critter has also been coming to our feeders. That’s the whole point of feeders, after all – to draw the animals to you, so you don’t have to go looking for them.

Generally the target group for feeders is birds, but rodents are big fans of the seed put out, as well. Squirrels get most of the attention, but chipmunks are just as frequently seen. In fact, when we first put our feeders out, the chipmunks found the seed within a couple days, but it took a few weeks before we saw the first squirrel there. Chipmunks are abundant in this neck of the woods. My parents have lots of chipmunks around, but up here we seem to have LOTS of chipmunks around.

The Eastern Chipmunk (Tamias striatus) is a forest species preferring deciduous and mixed woodlands, though urban parks will quite readily do as long as there are sufficient mature trees for food. It’s the only species of chipmunk (members of the genus Tamias) found in eastern North America. There’s one species that occurs in Eurasia, and the remaining 23 of the 25 species of Tamias are all native to western North America.

The Eastern Chipmunk’s scientific name, T. striatus, reflects its strongly striped back. It’s often described as having nine stripes, or five dark stripes interspersed with light ones, and technically that’s true, but to me the more intuitive way of describing it would be that it has a dark dorsal stripe, and two dark-bordered white stripes, one on each side.

The origin of the word chipmunk is less clear. One source says it’s from the Algonkian word for “head first”, for the way it descends trees, a second suggests it’s from an Odawa word for “red squirrel”. Another indicates that the “chip” part of chipmunk is in reference to the sound the critters make when alarmed (in the 1830s they were in fact called “chip squirrels”).

Chipmunks are notorious food-hoarders. They spend virtually their whole day searching out food and tucking it away for winter provisions. It’s possible for an individual, if they stumble across an especially rich food source (such as a birdfeeder) to pack away enough food to last their lifetime, nevermind just the winter, in just a single season. Though we tend to think of them as nut and seed eaters, they also eat berries, conifer cones, mushrooms and insects, and even small frogs or birds’ eggs. There’s usually enough food in a single acre of a good-quality forest to support up to 30 individuals, and the only reason there aren’t 30 chipmunks in every acre of woods is that they’re extremely territorial (Alvin, Simon and Theodore being the exception). This is why when you see two chipmunks together they’re nearly always chasing each other.

Just like with the Blue Jays, to aid in their efforts of hoarding food they have pouches on the inside of their cheeks into which they tuck the seed and other foodstuffs they collect. They use their tongue to manoeuver the seeds into the pouches, which together can hold as many as 70 sunflower seeds at once! When full, the pouches bulge in a pretty good imitation of the mumps, nearly doubling the width of the rodent’s face. When they get back to the burrow and want to empty out the pouches they use their paws to push the back of the outside of their cheeks, dislodging the seeds.

They’re pseudo-hibernators, spending the winter holed up and sleeping for most of it. They do enter a torpid state, where their body temperature might drop as low as 5-7 oC (41-45 oF) for periods, but they don’t go into the same deep state of torpor that bears and other true hibernators do, and therefore don’t need to pack on the pounds of fat. When they wake up in the middle of winter they’re able to easily feed from the food they collected over the fall and stored in their burrow. They dig a football-sized burrow about three feet (1 m) underground, and line it with leaves. The lead-in tunnel while they’re working on the burrow can be as much as 10 to 15 m (32 to 50 ft) long, putting the entrance hole quite some distance from the main burrow, which guards against predators so that they can’t just dig around the entrance hole if they find it. Once the burrow is done, they dig a new entry tunnel, and push all the dirt from the new hole back up the old one to plug it so that the mound of dirt on the surface is no longer an indication of an entrance. If they feel like getting fancy, they may add a storage chamber, a “dump” and a restroom to their burrow system.

Most western chipmunks have just one litter per year, but the Eastern has two, one in early spring just after thaw, and the other in mid-summer. When the male chipmunks wake up from their long winter’s sleep in the spring, they’re feeling pretty horny and the first thing they do, after perhaps grabbing a bite to eat so their growling stomach doesn’t embarrass them, is call upon the burrow of a nearby female. If the female hasn’t done her hair and makeup yet she may turn him away until she’s ready. Then all that territoriality that’s maintained over the rest of the year is forgotten, and the couple spend hours cuddling and playing (and mating) together. If two males come to court the same female at the same time, they’ll spend the day chasing each other until one wears out. The victor, the one who lasted the longest, is the one who gets the girl. The same thing plays out in the summer (minus the waking up from hibernation).

Each litter may contain up to 4-5 young. An individual chipmunk, if it survives the learning curve of its first year, may live 2-3 years on average in the wild (a captive chipmunk can reach 8 years) and could produce up to 30 youngsters. The majority of these will be taken by predators, or starve over the winter, and not make it to the following mating season, so populations don’t get overrun by the prolific breeding production. Young are driven off in late spring and early fall, at age 6 to 8 weeks, to fend for themselves. They will either find an old abandoned burrow or dig their own new one to spend the winter.

I don’t mind sharing some of our seed with one or two of these little guys to help them make it through the winter – they’re such characters, the forest would be duller without them!

Tag: Eastern Chipmunk

A chipmunk named Eddie

Preparing for the winter