JMcCombie

Chipmunk With Stuffed Cheeks

As the season progresses his little Chipmunk becomes bolder and makes it's journey from the back field to the fallen bird feed under the apple trees where ...
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As the season progresses his little Chipmunk becomes bolder and makes it's journey from the back field to the fallen bird feed under the apple trees where it stuff's it cheeks, keeping on high alert so as to avoid becoming a small meal for the hawks flying overhead. With such personality, is it any wonder these little critters have been immortalized by their cartoon counterparts of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Chipmunks may be classified either as a single genus, Tamias (Greek: ταμίας), or as three genera: Tamias, which includes the eastern chipmunk; Eutamias, which includes the Siberian chipmunk; and Neotamias, which includes the 23 remaining, mostly western, species. These classifications are arbitrary, and most taxonomies over the twentieth century have placed the chipmunks in a single genus. However, studies of mitochondrial DNA show that the divergence between each of the three chipmunk groups is comparable to the genetic dissimilarity between Marmota and Spermophilus.
Tamias is Greek for "treasurer", "steward", or "housekeeper", a reference to the animals' role in plant dispersal through their habit of collecting and storing food for winter use.
The common name originally may have been spelled "chitmunk," from the native Odawa (Ottawa) word jidmoonh, meaning "red squirrel" (cf. Ojibwe, ajidamoo). The earliest form cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (from 1842) is "chipmonk," however, "chipmunk" appears in several books from the 1820s and 1830s. Other early forms include "chipmuck" and "chipminck," and in the 1830s they were also referred to as "chip squirrels;" probably in reference to the sound they make. In the mid-1800s, John James Audubon and his sons, included a lithograph of the chipmunk in their Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, calling it the "Chipping Squirrel [or] Hackee." Chipmunks have also been referred to as "striped squirrels," "chippers," "munks," "timber tigers," or "ground squirrels;" although the name "ground squirrel" usually refers to other squirrels, such as those of the genus Spermophilus.
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. Around humans, chipmunks can eat cultivated grains and vegetables, and other plants from farms and gardens, so they are sometimes considered pests. Chipmunks mostly forage on the ground, but they climb trees to obtain nuts such as hazelnuts and acorns. At the beginning of autumn, many species of chipmunk begin to stockpile nonperishable foods for winter. They mostly stuff food into their cheek pouches and cache their foods in a larder in their burrows and remain in their nests until spring, unlike some other species, which make multiple small caches of food. Cheek pouches allow chipmunks to carry multiple food items to their burrows for either storage or consumption.
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