Small enough to overlook, and fast enough to vanish the moment you notice it.

The stone walls, wood piles, and garden beds around Montclair homes support a surprising amount of chipmunk activity just below the surface.

What they look like

Eastern chipmunks are small, reddish-brown rodents, usually just five to six inches long not counting the tail, with a distinctive pattern of dark and light stripes running down the back and sides. Their expandable cheek pouches — which can stretch to hold an impressive volume of seeds and nuts — are one of their most recognisable features in action.

Family life

Chipmunks typically breed twice a year, in early spring and again in summer, producing litters of three to five young after about a month’s gestation. Young are born in an underground burrow, blind and hairless, and stay below ground nursing for about six weeks before emerging.

Unlike many small mammals, chipmunks are largely solitary outside of breeding season. Each adult maintains and defends its own burrow system and doesn’t share territory or food caches, even with its own offspring once they disperse.

Daily habits

Chipmunks are active during the day, especially in early morning, and spend much of that time foraging and hauling food back to underground storage chambers in their cheek pouches.

They’re true hoarders rather than scatter-hoarders like squirrels — each chipmunk keeps a central larder in its burrow rather than burying food in many small caches around the yard.

Chipmunks go into a light form of winter dormancy called torpor rather than true hibernation: they wake periodically through winter to eat from their stored food, rather than sleeping straight through.

Territory and range

Chipmunk burrow systems are surprisingly elaborate — a network of tunnels that can extend over ten feet, with separate chambers for nesting, food storage, and waste. Home range is small, often less than half an acre, centred tightly around the burrow entrance. That’s why the same chipmunk tends to reappear in the same spot in a yard day after day.

Living alongside chipmunks

Chipmunks are generally welcome company — they do little real damage and provide meaningful ecological value.

• Appreciate the seed dispersal. Cached seeds that go unclaimed often sprout, making chipmunks a small but steady source of plant regeneration.
• Protect vulnerable plantings if needed. Chipmunks will occasionally dig up spring bulbs; a layer of hardware cloth over new bulb beds solves this without harming them.
• Leave burrow entrances alone. A small hole near a stone wall or foundation is rarely structural — chipmunk burrows are shallow and don’t threaten building foundations the way larger burrowing animals can.
• Keep feeders tidy. Spilled birdseed under feeders is a major chipmunk draw; cleaning up excess reduces the incentive to burrow nearby.

Quick, industrious, and mostly out of sight, chipmunks are one of the easiest wild neighbours to coexist with — a small, constant presence that asks for little more than to be left to its tunnels.