Chip or is it Dale?

by Ken Johnston
Editor

I have been enjoying watching a busy little beaver, or rather a chipmunk around my house this year.

He was a scrawny little thing this spring and has since grown and started to actually get fat.

I don’t know what he was eating early in the season but he was fun to watch scamper around the yard and even more fun to watch him play tricks on my two dogs.

He would dart right in front of them under the deck. The dogs would lay there watching the spot he ran under and figured he would come back out there.

Unbeknownst to them he had exited on another side of the deck and come full circle behind them. If he could yell “Boo“ I am sure he would have done so and scared the dogs.

As the summer progressed he began eating my choke-cherries... the birds didn’t like him in “their” tree and often scolded him and chased him out of it.

As the cherries ran out he decided that another cherry so to speak was to his liking. My cherry tomato plant became his next source of food.

While I have had plenty of tomatoes off the plant and do not mind sharing with him, I do not appreciate his selective eating habits.

He will eat part of one, then move to another, and then to another. He effectively ruined a good many of them on me. I am not sure what to do about it... I have tried scaring him but he always comes back. I have turned the sprinkler on in the flower bed where the plant is and that gets rid of him for a while.

So I resorted to picking the tomatoes just as they begin to turn ripe... he doesn’t seem to like them until they are red.

I am not sure where he is living, but I am sure that he has not had too many nights of sleep without a full belly.

I find that I Donald Duck’s escapades with Chip and Dale in Disney’s cartoons fit this little guy and me to a Tee!

Soon the acorns across the street will be ready and he will begin dodging traffic on Third Street.

I haven’t heard many solutions for getting the little fella to leave my tomatoes alone, have you got any?

–Until then,

Ken