day 18

Quite frankly, the chipmunks are annoying me. I have spent no small amount of time in the woods these past few weeks, and I am ready to have it out with these guys. Over the years, when I should have been doing something useful like looking for a job, I have learned to move softly through a forest. Sometimes this is a bad idea, like when we kept surprising bears (so many bears) in a state park in New Brunswick one time, but mostly it means that you get to see more wildlife and take some cool photos. Yesterday, walking through the 2,000 acres that comprise Moose Hill (which, by the way, is Mass Audubon’s first refuge), I managed to surprise five deer over the course of a couple of hours. One fairly impressive buck snorted at me from the top of a ridge and took off, one lone doe stood and watched me, hoping I would move first. The best was when I came across three does having a lie-down just off the trail. They blew out of there, and when I reached the spot where they were resting, I reached down and felt a depression in the earth. It was still warm.

The thing about the chipmunks is that they are constantly sounding these piercing alarm calls, and their timing always seems a little off. It is true that it can be more unnerving to wildlife when a human being is acting oddly, in my case moving quietly. Sometimes I think that they prefer you to stomp around and talk and generally make a ton of noise and thereby miss 99% of what is going on around you - this is what they expect from us. Stalking around means trouble, like maybe I might be looking for someone to eat. But these chipmunks go a bit overboard. For one thing, they send out a shriek and then run off madly to some invisible hole, but only after you have passed and are clearly no longer coming at them. This never fails to cause me to jump. Secondly, they set up an incessant loop of shrill chirps, often in pairs, slightly off beat from each other, whenever I am standing in one place for a long time, waiting for some or other bird to appear from behind a twig or tangle of leaves. It’s like alright already, the whole forest knows I’m here, so can you just SHUT UP NOW?

I have tried to photograph the little devils on a number of occasions. They are are strangely brave for their diminutive size, but they do not like to sit still, and the woods are usually too dark for a decent shot. Photographing them is therefore also annoying. But yesterday, at the end of my walk, something wondrous and new happened: I startled a chipmunk, and it ran, but found itself trapped without a hole against a stone wall and a big scary road, and it froze. HA, I thought as I fired off a round of shots, you’re not shrieking now, are you?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 10:43pm and is filed under Drawings, Animals, Residency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.