Though tiny and secretive, the least chipmunk is renowned as a bold campground raider. Inhabiting sunlit open forests and brushy clearings from northwestern Quebec and central Ontario to the Yukon, it’s Canada’s puniest member of the squirrel family. With unique skills, speed, and endurance, this chippy has a paw up on its brawnier kin when amassing its winter larder in the dwindling daylight of autumn.
Least chipmunks are noisy ventriloquists, and seem to throw their chips, squeaks, and trills, making them hard to spot. Despite being loners, they have up to half a dozen different alarm calls, warning neighbours of danger and foiling predators.
Cottage Q&A: Is it okay to feed chipmunks?
Unlike any other mammal, the elfin chippies unhusk and coat the seeds they collect with thick saliva before burying them in small, scattered clumps, hiding their scent from competitors. While adeptly pillaging from larger chipmunks and squirrels, they choose covert and spread-out hiding places, and better remember them when it’s time to pool provisions into their winter burrows. They’re also the only rodents known to pee where they’ve emptied a cache, so that they don’t check there again.
As it gets cold, the industrious hoarders snuggle into feather, down, and fur-lined balls of grass and leaves up to 50 centimetres below the ground. Their heart rate and body temperature drop. But they usually rouse from torpor every few days to snack from up to several thousand seeds, nuts, and cherry pits beneath the nest or in an adjoining chamber. Chipmunks with insufficient stores, low weight, or poor burrow conditions remain in torpor longer, depleting brain synapses and memory skills vital for survival.
Cottage Q&A: How common are white squirrels?
Least chipmunks mate in early spring and bear four or five young a month later. Many also move into brush piles, hollow logs, or old woodpecker holes until refurbishing or digging new winter burrows in late summer.
This article was originally published in the September/October 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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