Chipmunk Chillin' on the Railin' #4
by J McCombie
Title
Chipmunk Chillin' on the Railin' #4
Artist
J McCombie
Medium
Painting - Photographic
Description
This little Chipmunk is taking it easy trying to beat the heat of the sun on the railing of the deck under the snowball bush. He was draped over the railing with his eyes shut, so I feared something had gotten to him and thought I might have to go over to see if he had a pulse. He was still alert and opened his eye as I approached.
With such personality, is it any wonder these little critters have been immortalized by their cartoon counterparts of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Alvin and the Chipmunks is an American animated music group created by Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. for a novelty record in 1958. The group consists of three singing animated anthropomorphic chipmunks: Alvin, the mischievous troublemaker, who quickly became the star of the group; Simon, the tall, bespectacled intellectual; and Theodore, the chubby, impressionable one. The trio is managed by their human adoptive father, David (Dave) Seville. In reality, "David Seville" was Bagdasarian's stage name, and the Chipmunks themselves are named after the executives of their original record label. The characters became a success, and the singing Chipmunks and their manager were given life in several animated cartoon productions, using redrawn, anthropomorphic chipmunks, and eventually films.
Chipmunks are small, striped rodents of the family Sciuridae. All species of chipmunks are found in North America, with the exception of the Siberian chipmunk, which is found in Asia.
Chipmunks may be classified either as a single genus, Tamias (Greek: , or as three genera: Tamias, which includes the eastern chipmunk; Eutamias, which includes the Siberian chipmunk; and Neotamias, which includes the 23 remaining, mostly western, species. These classifications are arbitrary, and most taxonomies over the twentieth century have placed the chipmunks in a single genus. However, studies of mitochondrial DNA show that the divergence between each of the three chipmunk groups is comparable to the genetic dissimilarity between Marmota and Spermophilus.
Tamias is Greek for "treasurer", "steward", or "housekeeper", a reference to the animals' role in plant dispersal through their habit of collecting and storing food for winter use.
The common name originally may have been spelled "chitmunk," from the native Odawa (Ottawa) word jidmoonh, meaning "red squirrel" (cf. Ojibwe, ajidamoo). The earliest form cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (from 1842) is "chipmonk," however, "chipmunk" appears in several books from the 1820s and 1830s. Other early forms include "chipmuck" and "chipminck," and in the 1830s they were also referred to as "chip squirrels;" probably in reference to the sound they make. In the mid-1800s, John James Audubon and his sons, included a lithograph of the chipmunk in their Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, calling it the "Chipping Squirrel [or] Hackee." Chipmunks have also been referred to as "striped squirrels," "chippers," "munks," "timber tigers," or "ground squirrels;" although the name "ground squirrel" usually refers to other squirrels, such as those of the genus Spermophilus.
Chipmunks have an omnivorous diet primarily consisting of seeds, nuts and other fruits, and buds. They also commonly eat grass, shoots, and many other forms of plant matter, as well as fungi, insects and other arthropods, small frogs, worms, and bird eggs. Around humans, chipmunks can eat cultivated grains and vegetables, and other plants from farms and gardens, so they are sometimes considered pests. Chipmunks mostly forage on the ground, but they climb trees to obtain nuts such as hazelnuts and acorns. At the beginning of autumn, many species of chipmunk begin to stockpile nonperishable foods for winter. They mostly stuff food into their cheek pouches and cache their foods in a larder in their burrows and remain in their nests until spring, unlike some other species, which make multiple small caches of food. Cheek pouches allow chipmunks to carry multiple food items to their burrows for either storage or consumption.
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November 10th, 2015
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