They love nuts, berries, seeds, and fruits… but more than anything they like food that’s easy to find. If chipmunks seem particularly prevalent around your home, it’s probably because they’ve found a reliable food source. Chipmunks love exploiting bird feeders, feed bags, pet food, or garbage.

Chipmunks are excellent tree climbers and swimmers who live in a variety of habitats, including plains, mountains, forests, and deserts.

Ranging from Canada to Mexico, they are generally seen scampering through the undergrowth of a variety of environments from alpine forests to shrubby deserts. Some dig burrows to live in, complete with tunnels and chambers, while others make their homes in nests, bushes, or logs.

Cute but dangerous: Chipmunks, although they look harmless, are anything but. Like other rodents, they carry a variety of diseases that can be spread to you and your family. Although chipmunks are not aggressive creatures, they will bite or scratch if they are cornered or feel threatened.

Do Chipmunks Bite? While all wild animals are capable of biting when threatened, chipmunks are rarely aggressive and will most often run away from threats. When cornered or handled, however, they may scratch or bite to defend themselves.

Chipmunks also love nuts, so peanuts and peanut butter can also be successful, and some people even use popcorn.

They have been known to eat bread dough, sugar, cookies, baked goods, bread pieces, chips and the like. While they eat all these items with great zest, their intake has to be carefully monitored. Too much sugar or bread can be quite harmful for their system and bones, thus causing them great harm.

Chipmunks are not known for their night vision. They’re a diurnal, or daytime, creature whose eyes work best when the sun is out. Chipmunks tend to sleep when the sun sets. When they do come out at night, they’re at a grave disadvantage, but they are not totally blind thanks to how their eyes are made.

Chipmunks have an omnivorous diet primarily consisting of seeds, nuts and other fruits, and buds. They also commonly eat grass, shoots, and many other forms of plant matter, as well as fungi, insects and other arthropods, small frogs, worms, and bird eggs.

Chipmunks are rodents that are a type of squirrel. These small, furry animals are identified by their stubby legs, bushy tails and the white, black and brown stripes that run down their backs.

Many animals and birds eat chipmunks. These predators include owls, hawks, weasels, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, bobcats, lynxes, cats, dogs, snakes and even their relatives the red squirrels, depending on the location. Many chipmunks, such as the eastern chipmunk, create multichambered burrows underground.

Hawks, owls, snakes, foxes, dogs, cats, raccoons, coyotes and weasels all prey on the tiny rodents. When a foraging chipmunk detects a predator it sounds an alarm, perhaps to warn others to scurry to safety.

We found that house cats will kill a wide variety of animals, including: lizards, voles, chipmunks, birds, frogs, and small snakes.”

So despite domestication, dogs still have an instinctive desire to chase, grab, bite and kill things that look like prey. This is why your cute little Yorkie will run down a squirrel, catching and killing at times. Allowing a dog to chase down small animals strengthens the prey drive.

There are many animals that can chew through cement. The most common include rats and mice. Over the years I’ve seen rats, mice, raccoon, opossum, shrews, voles, moles, chipmunks, ground hogs, muskrat, otter and skunk chew through cement or forms thereof.

Drop five or six mothballs into any chipmunk hole you find in the yard and cover them with dirt. Use caution if children or pets are regularly in the area, because mothballs are toxic.

Chipmunks are not fond of mothballs. Place mothballs around the foundation of your house and in any known chipmunk holes.

2 to 3 feet

This species has one breeding cycle in a year, between the months of February to July, with most mating sessions take place in April or May. The gestation period is between 28 to 36 days. The females give birth to 3 to 8 infants. However, if the litter dies, the female chipmunk can enter the estrus again.

Eastern chipmunk: 3 years

Chipmunks are most commonly known to spread plague, salmonella, and hantavirus. Plague is a bacterial infection that attacks the immune system. It is usually transmitted via the bites of fleas carried by infected rodents. Chipmunks spread salmonella the same way they spread plague.