That Industrious Chipmunk

At breakfast this morning, looking out the patio doors at the sky, we watched a Great Blue Heron wing its way somewhere, but likely not the ravine close by, although we've seen them there on occasion. It was obviously by-passing the ravine given its trajectory, but it was exciting to see the bird in flight.

Monday is the day I clean the house and I was busy doing just that, when my husband called me to come outside, to the backyard. There, under the deck, where my husband had laid a thick layer of fine-crushed stone after he had excavated all the clay and building detritus that had lain there for years, was the little resident chipmunk.

We had noticed weeks ago that a hole had suddenly appeared where there had been none before and hypothesized that it was his handiwork. We felt convinced the little chipmunk lived under the garden shed, actually, and that is where my husband tosses shelled peanuts every day by the handful; one for the chipmunk, another on the pathway for the red and black squirrels, the cardinals, the chickadees. They're usually gone within a matter of minutes; sometimes we see them being picked up, sometimes we don't, but they're popular.

There was the chipmunk, at the hole, busy enlarging it. But more, the chipmunk was excavating dirt and clay, and in the clods it energetically threw up were what looked like small nut pods. It must have been keenly aware of our presence, for we were not more than four feet distance from it, but it ignored our us completely, and we sat there, entranced with the little creature and its independent determination to clean house. When it appeared satisfied that it had extracted all of its cache, it broke open each of the cases, filled its cheek pouches with the interior and ran off elsewhere, until it had completed its mission.

Unperturbed at our presence, insouciant to a degree, it went about its business. I watched as it disappeared into the hole, and then a few minutes later, it ran from an opposite direction entirely; evidently from under the garden shed, back to its new tunnel, overground, to once again disappear into the interior underground. The distance between the garden shed and the tunnel outlet under the deck must be a good twenty-five feet. That's a lot of tunnelling, that's one busy chipmunk.

While I cleaned the house, he who is clearly my finer half by far, mowed the grass, and watered the gardens and the garden pots. Noticing that I had trimmed the ornamental trees, noting that the poppies are all opening, and the allium and the irises and the lilacs. The bridal wreath spirea is a veritable fount of tiny white flowers spilling over the delicate branches hardly able to contain their abundance. The peonies, pink, red and yellow, are opening their gorgeous displays of lush flower heads. The rhododendrons are splendidly ablaze.

In the ravine we came across a woman walking a pair of Bichon Frise dogs. Although we'd never seen her before we knew the dogs, as her husband always walks them. We stopped to talk awhile, then she suddenly remarked that she heard something odd. We stopped talking, and we all heard it, an odd electrical-mechanical sound, that we just were unable to place. But it became louder and then louder again, and as we looked toward where the sound appearing to be emanating from, we saw a cloud of what appeared to be hundreds of bees.

And we moved off with alacrity, in opposite directions; best to avoid any such encounter. And a most peculiar encounter it was indeed, never before experienced by us in our two decades of hiking in the ravine. We heard the sweet song of a cardinal high above, and I wondered what kind of danger such a moving cloud of angry bees might pose to birds. The birds are certainly capable of making themselves scarce far quicker than we bipedals.