The eastern chipmunk is the fourth most frequently recorded mammal in Maine’s atlas, with 2,134 mapped sightings clustered heavily along the coast. Records nearly vanish each winter, not because the animal disappears, but because of what it’s doing underground at that point in the year.
Stone walls and coastal forest edges
Records concentrate around Acadia National Park and the broader Maine coast, where mixed deciduous and conifer forest meets old stone walls left over from generations of coastal farmland. Those walls, along with rock piles and downed timber, give chipmunks exactly the secure burrow entrances and travel cover they need close to the open, sunny edges where they gather nuts and seeds by day. A chipmunk rarely digs a simple burrow; it builds a network of tunnels and side chambers, and a stretch of stacked fieldstone gives it a head start on that structure.
Why winter records disappear almost completely
Sightings climb through spring and summer, peak in June, and fall off sharply by November, staying low through February. Eastern chipmunks don’t hibernate the way a woodchuck does. Instead they hole up in their burrow through the coldest months, dropping into long bouts of torpor and waking every so often to eat from a cache of nuts and seeds stored earlier in the year. Barely any come to the surface until the ground starts to warm, which is exactly the pattern Maine’s records show.
Status in Maine
NatureServe ranks the eastern chipmunk S5, secure, and it’s native to Maine. Its presence along the coast tracks how much old stone wall and forest edge habitat survives development pressure in the state’s more populated coastal towns.
