When we first started feeding birds last year, we had a small plastic feeder which we hung from a fruit tree and a large plastic dish which we placed on the ground. The small feeder quickly fell apart, but the dish served as a solid place to attract many types of birds: cardinals, sparrows and blue jays were particularly fond of the dish on the ground. But regrettably, so were squirrels and chipmunks.
You would think that chipmunks are such tiny creatures that they couldn’t be very much of a problem….you would think that, but you would be wrong. Those cute pudgy cheeks shown in cartoons really exist. They really do bulge out –but only when they are packed with food that the chipmunk carries quickly back to a burrow somewhere for use later. And in just a few moments, they are back harvesting food for another mouth bulging trip home. So actually, though really tiny, chipmunks can vacuum up vast quantities of bird seed very rapidly—far more rapidly than squirrels and certainly more than any of the local birds. The chipmunks are relentless. Since they really aren’t eating much or at all, they never get full. They continued to remove all the bird feed we put in the dish on the ground until it is gone. They can usually empty the dish in an hour.
Other animals don’t think chipmunks are cute. Indeed, on the ground, most other birds and animals are afraid of them at least to some extent. This might seem reasonable for a sparrow, because the chipmunk is bigger and has the extra advantage of being a land animal in its favored habitat. But a blue jay is many times the size of a chipmunk but yet blue jays are afraid of chipmunks also. When a chipmunk is feeding from the dish on the ground, it will rush blue jays scaring them. Depending on the Blue Jay, it will fly off to some other place to eat or simply jump back a foot or two and wait out the chipmunk. If the blue jay is there first, it will sidle to the side of the dish and start eating. Then it will forget that it was the second one there and rush the blue jay anyway.
The squirrels we have observed won’t try to compete with chipmunks on the ground, either. When a squirrel finds itself on the ground near a chipmunk, it creates some distance and will give up the food dish if necessary to maintain that distance. And when a chipmunk knows there food to be gathered, it is always necessary to maintain distance. It will rush the squirrel if necessary to get it to move out of the dish or even to move a greater distance away.
Chipmunks aren’t even friendly and sharing with other chipmunks. In fact, they are more violent with other chipmunks than they are with birds and squirrels. Birds and Squirrels just get intimidated to move a few inches or feet away. But other chipmunks get much more violent treatment. One chipmunk will try to claim the entire courtyard area and will attack any other chipmunk that comes within sight of it. High-speed chases with lots of squeaking protests and perhaps some bites are a regular event during the day. The other chipmunk must either leave the court yard or at least find a hiding place where the other one can’t find it. It’s an effective strategy for the dominant one but only for a while. Usually two or three other chipmunks will be waiting just out of sight. Sometimes it will be behind the air conditioner. At other times they jump into a tall flower pot and duck down. Sometimes they become lost in the bushes. A few will simply stop just outside the fence. They will all wait until the dominant goes back to its burrow with its cheeks full. Then the next bravest one cautiously heads for the dish and the others spread out to gather anything else that might be scattered on the ground within the area normally defended by the now absent dominant chipmunk.
So we set out to solve the chipmunk problem. First we bought a metal shepherds hook style post with four hanging arms and a set of four different types of cylindrical feeders with perches or wire feeders. We continued with the dish on the ground, but we didn’t put as much feed in it. Eventually, we just placed it under the cylinder feeders and it caught some of what the birds dropped which the chipmunks would clean up.
This eliminated the chipmunk problem. They were now doing us a favor by cleaning up the feed that the birds dropped. But squirrels started jumping to the feeders from a nearby fence. This caused us to move the feeders a little further from the fence (which created the inadvertent experiment in The Phantom Feeder). The squirrels could no longer jump from the fence or any other object to the top of the feeder, but they amazed us when we discovered them climbing the half inch square smooth metal post to the shepherd hooks, sliding and crawling their way over to the feed cylinders and then using their front feet they tiled the feeders dumping the food into their mouth (and even more on to the ground) while hanging on with their two rear feet.
Frankly, we admired their acrobatic skill and clever ingenuity. We watched them in awe for several days. We would chase them off at the times birds normally eat and this would allow us to watch the birds. The squirrels developed all kinds of clever ways to dump the feed from the feeders to the ground during the night. Then they would eat at night and the chipmunks would clean up what they missed during the day. It wasn’t perfect, but it was workable.
I hit upon the idea of putting petroleum jelly (Vaseline) on the post and the shepherd’s hooks. This worked pretty well and we had great fun watching them jump on the pole, then slide down it (in the middle of summer). They couldn’t get a good enough grip to climb the pole and they got too much grease on their paws to hang on to the bottom of the cylinders even when they could get to them. After they tried for several days, they eventually became discouraged and only occasionally would try again just in case the pole ceased to be slippery.
Vaseline was a nuisance for the birds because they often landed on the shepherd’s hooks before selecting a feeder. If they landed on a part with too much slope, they would end up sliding to the bottom of the hook. They would just have to hop to a feeder a little faster, so we lived with that problem—or rather the birds did.
At this point the squirrels were now minor pests though they still struggled to find some weakness in our defense. However, now we noticed that blue jays weren’t the most desirable bird to have at the feeders. When they were there, anything smaller wouldn’t come to the feeders. That turns out to be every other type of bird that was visiting our feeders.
It occurred to me that blue jays needed to eat too, and they are really fun to watch. So I nailed a breadbasket to the top of our courtyard fence and put whole sunflower seed in it. I hoped to train them to stay away from the feeders and just use the basket. And it worked! I would watch during the day. Because the feeders were only a couple of meters away from me, they wouldn’t come to the feeder. Smaller birds would. Since I provided the blue jays with their favorite food in the basket, they quickly learned to go there and eventually, they forgot all about the feeders.
But the squirrels also discovered the basket. Very quickly, one dominant squirrel claimed it and drove off all the others whenever they approached. We could afford to feed blue jays and one squirrel, so we declared victory and continued this through out the reminder of the summer and fall. It even seemed to work through the winter.
However, spring was a new season and we had to start the whole process over again. I inadvertently did something slightly different and things didn’t work the way they had the previous year. So this year we have had a new set of adventures.
But those adventures will have to wait for another time.