I accidentally-on-purpose spilled some sunflower seeds when I refilled the bird feeder, just to see who was awake. Surprisingly, the seeds remained untouched for about two days, then this fellow appeared… and cleaned them up in a matter of minutes.
Spring is on its way, despite the recent storms!
Taken with the Sony DSC-H5 zoomed in all the way (12x) through the 1.7x tele-adapter. It’s not a great combination, but it’s better than no picture at all. This is a crop of about the middle half of the image, with a touch of unsharp mask, then scaled down 2:1 for improved webbishness. After all that, it’s a wonder you don’t mistake the critter for a moose…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
5 responses to “Chipmunk”
Hi Ed,
We have very similar looking squirrels here. No brown but grey all over. At the west coastal hill area where I grow coffee, they are brown and then there are also giant Malabar squirrels.
Raj, vu2zap
Wow, that’s some squirrel!
We have grays, reds, chipmunks, and groundhogs (aka marmots).
All of them are basically tree rats, but chippies show how far you can get with good public relations and a snappy paint job…
Our big rat version is the Mongoose! I have a family of them living in a deep bush next to the lawn. They pop out in the evening and frolic on the lawn. Then we get civet cats who come for them and the foxes. Food chain I suppose.
Food chain
We recently watched a hawk take down a squirrel: snagged him right out of a tree, after a bit of cat-and-mouse chasing around the trunk.
And they’re murder on chipmunks, too, being unaffected by all that good PR.
Go, hawks, go!
(You probably have feral peafowl and think nothing of them…)
You got that right Ed, there are wild fowls there. I am not sure of the name.