I hesitated with the title of this post since this is clearly a ground squirrel and not a chipmunk, but I grew up in the east and when at dinner I stuffed my cheeks the way this squirrel has, they told me I had “chipmunk cheeks”.
Like that was a bad thing.
To the casual observer, a golden-mantled ground squirrel might appear to be part of the chipmunk family given the light-and-dark stripes that run the length of its body, but it is, you might have guessed, a ground squirrel. Even with a quick glance, you can tell the difference as in chipmunks the stripes extend into the face, while in ground squirrels they do not.
When I reached the top of the Pinnacle Peak Trail, this bold golden-mantled ground squirrel hoped I would offer up some of my food, and when I did not, tried to help himself.
I did eventually shoo the little thief away, not because it was being aggressive, but because its constant movements were kicking fine dirt onto my camera bag and I didn’t want to risk it also getting on my camera gear and gumming up the lenses. I saw many ground squirrels on this trip, even on trails more popular than this one, and even on this trail just a short distance away, yet this is the only one that approached me offering to lighten my load.
How often do you see a squirrel in a lava flow? Taken near the trailhead of the Trail of Molten Land at the Lava Lands Visitor Center.
I thought I knew what these ground squirrels were but I happened to glance through the back of my mammals guide while on this trip and realized there are two kinds of golden-mantled ground squirrels in the Mount Rainier area, the regular kind and the Cascade kind. I’m not sure which one this is yet, after I finish editing all my pictures (or if I finish editing all my pictures) I’ll try and find out.
Some of these squirrels didn’t have a strong black line above the white line, only below, but I don’t know how definitive of an ID mark that is. One thing I do know is that they sure are cute! This one wasn’t too far from the top of the trail where another ground squirrel was trying to steal my food, but this fellow wasn’t interested in me. It would stand on its hind legs and grab as many seed pods as it could, extract the seeds and stuff them into its already full cheeks, then move nearby and repeat repeat repeat until it must have filled its cheeks and sprinted off to the other side of the hill.