"paghat" wrote in message
news
In article ,
(Georgia) wrote:

Just curious if anyone has an effective remedy for keeping chippers
from digging up perennials? I recently planted a bed of about 50-60
plants and the stupid chipmunks are already destroying it! I have been
using a Havahart trap and have caught and re-released (far away) about
25 so far. They're probably just coming right back...

HELP!

Thanks!

It would be highly unusual for 25 chipmunks to share territory as unlike
prairie dogs they're not the least bit communal. In years when food
resources are high, populations do increase, & territories shrink, so
there are more territories overlapping in smaller areas, but the majority
will be youngsters who'll be forced to move away the instant food
resources fall back to normal. The "large" chipmunk population would
ordinarily be one to three per acre. Even when they have population
explosions that only results in ten chipmunks per acre, few of which would
travel much beyond their own little spots without risking at least
getting yelled aggressively by the chipmunk in the abutting territory.
When food resources drop, there's a rapid die-off back to two or three
animals; they don't horde food like grey squirrels so are more sensitive
to food availability ups & downs. However, any time some chipmunk gets
killed or otherwise vacates its spot, some adolescent chipmunk seeking its
own territory would figure it out in a day or two & fill the vacancy. This
means it's pretty much not possible to ever be free of them if there is a
healthy population for miles around, as adolescents MUST find their own
spots or be harrassed to death.

It WOULD be normal for a trapped-&-released chipmunk to scurry right back
to its territory. They are so strongly territorial they keep rival
chipmunks out of "taken" feeding areas, so a stranger would have no choice
but to find its way home, or spend the last misery-ridden weeks of its
life beaten up & harrassed every time it showed itself. It wouldn't be the
least unusual for a chipmunk to make it back from five miles away. If
release were, say, a scant mile away, it'd be back so fast it would hardly
even miss a meal. Release would have to be ten miles away for it to be
nearly impossible to get home. You might start marking each release with a
different color dye, just for the fun of finding out for sure if you've
really only got a couple chipmunks that you've been bussing around town
again & again.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

What about ground squirrels? I have these digging up my plants, and I have
seen as many as five living in the same tunnel complex. Maybe these are
what's bothering Georgia.

-Adam