Little Chipmunk 371 



to be seen scaling the walls and scampering over the roof. 

 One day when I was at the mill, I found that they had entered 

 by a broken window, had licked clean some unwashed plates 

 left on a bench, and had even taken samples of the eatables 

 left in the cupboard. I went on another day to the mill in 

 order to try and catch some Chipmunks alive. This I found 

 a very easy thing to do with a figure-4 box-trap. The animals 

 seemed perfectly unsuspecting. Whilst I was setting one of 

 these a Chipmunk extracted my small store of bait from the 

 paper in which it was wrapped, and consumed a considerable 

 portion of it. As the little thief scampered off at my approach, 

 with every appearance of laughing at me, he dropped the bread 

 and I secured it; but I had no sooner done this than on looking 

 round found that another Chipmunk was sitting upright on 

 the top of the trap I had just set, nibbling at my bait, which he 

 held in his forepaws, and eyeing me sharply, but otherwise 

 manifesting a coolness and deliberateness of procedure that 

 completely staggered me." 



"On October 23 [at Peninsula Harbor, Ont.], I found 

 an adult female in a nest built of feathers and soft vegetable 

 fibres, at the end of a tunnel under a clump of bearberry. 

 The tunnel was about two feet long and terminated a foot or 

 more beneath the surface in a chamber about the size of a 

 cocoanut. This chamber was completely filled by the nest, 

 which contained, in addition to its occupant, a small store of 

 seeds of various weeds and wild fruits." (Miller, p. 31). 



Edwin Hollis records^ that "a specimen taken at Touch- 

 wood Hills, April 13, 1902, had barley in its cheek-pouches and 

 was quite a quarter mile from the nearest barley field or 

 granary, so evidently had a winter store." 



In August and September the little Chipmunk emulates 

 its cousin in labouring for the rainy days to come. As late as 

 September 26 at Fort Resolution I saw one carrying home 

 great bulging pouchfuls of skunk-grass seeds. About the end 

 of the month, it finally plugs its doorway against the cold, the 

 wet and the Least Weasel, and curls up for its six months' sleep. 



* Zoologist, August 15, 1902, p. 297. 



