Wildlife Wednesday 10/15/2025

Happy #WildlifeWednesday! You may have noticed Eastern chipmunks are particularly active right now. The cheeky rodents are busy with their winter preparations, which means gathering as much food as possible to stockpile in their dens. They use their cheek pouches to hold and transport the food items and look pretty cute while doing it.

Their dens are located underground, with extensive tunnel systems and multiple entrances. They conceal the entryways by covering them with leaf litter, twigs, and small rocks. Chipmunks dig crevices in the walls of their burrows to store nuts, seeds, and bulbs. They can gather over one hundred  acorns in a day, and tend to stash more food than they actually need.

Eastern chipmunks are active during the daylight hours and spend most of their time foraging. They live mostly solitary lives and are very territorial and will defend their burrows, where they will spend the winter. They do not enter true hibernation but instead go into a state of reduced physical activity and metabolism called torpor, relying on the cache of food they collected to get them through the cold weather months.

At this time of year, early fall, their calls are more noticeable than usual, a rhythmic and hollow-sounding cluck, almost like the steady beat of a drum. This vocalization is an alarm to other chipmunks that a hawk or other raptor is in the area overhead. The call is more frequent in the fall because the chipmunks are more actively out and about as they gather food and can get distracted with their efforts. The alert from others will cause them to join in, resulting in a chorus of clucks throughout the forest.