When I was 12 years old and a full-fledged paperboy, one of the highlights of my morning route was to try to sneak up on the chipmunks at Nancy Young’s house. The Young’s had a rock wall as a landscape border and it was full of “munks”, the skitziest critters I have ever seen. They’d spot me coming and zip beneath the rocks in a flash.
I have always found chipmunks to be interesting creatures and we have a couple now living in our back yard. We call them Chipper and Dale and they are quite the entertainers.
Chipmunks are really rats with stripes. They are members of the rodent family, meaning they are quite adept at gnawing. But unlike other rodents, they have a space between their front teeth and back molars, which is perfect for stashing away goodies. Our little monks fill their cheeks to the brim before scurrying to their burrows and storing their seeds and nuts.
Our chipmunks went into hibernation in late November last year and just emerged a few weeks back. One of the “munks” is extremely fat. We think she may be pregnant.
They say chipmunks make ideal household pets – friendly, active and sociable. A new industry of raising and selling domesticated chipmunks is on the rise.
I don’t know if I would want the cute creatures scurrying around inside my house, but I enjoy seeing them in the yard.
In fact, we now have a chipmunk feeder, a wire cage with a small PVC pipe leading in, which squirrels and larger animals cannot penetrate, but the munks can.
Each day I scatter a few seeds inside the cage and marvel at how the small rodents squeeze their way inside. I hope the pregnant monk doesn’t get stuck, but if she gets any bigger, she might.
In the meantime, I wonder if the Young’s still have a chipmunk colony in Lewisburg, WV?