I discovered a chipmunk burrow in our backyard and I was curious to do some
experiments so I put some sunflower seeds in a plastic bottle to see what
the chipmunk would do about it the neck of the bottle only has an
opening of about three centimeters which I guess for a chipmunk is a pretty tight
squeeze but it managed to make it in there eventually
next I stood the bottle on its end and I also put a few rocks in the bottle to
help stabilize it and make it more difficult to get the seeds I spilled a
few seeds so the Chipmunks going through those ones first
of course now how to get in there from that tiny perch that turned out to be
quite tricky but knocking with a bottle solved the problems and this chipmunk
went down the Burrow and then another one showed up so I guess there's two
looking at that bottle and here's another visitor looking for more seeds
my first experiment I just spread them on the ground but birds got all of them
before the chipmunks came for my next experiment
I got a nice glass milk bottle from an organic store and that bottle is much
clearer and also has a slightly bigger opening to make it easier for the
chipmunks I wanted to set it up so that the bottle
would tip over when the chipmunk was in the bottle but the bottle center of
gravity wasn't quite right for that so I added a rock to shift that so I could
have more overhang on the end
not quite far enough that chipmunk is too late and it doesn't go down far
enough come on tip already Willie uh so this time I decided to stick the
sunflower seeds to the bottom of the bottle using some gooey sandwich spread
and I put the rock on the neck of the bottle to get it further out and really
put on the edge of tipping over on its own
okay chipmunk I'm gonna get you this time boiled again okay let's try that
exact same setup again but this time I'm careful not to put any seeds under the
neck of the bottle so that the chipmunk won't knock it over by accident ha
gotcha that Chipmunks got a pretty cool head to
eat the seeds before it even thinks about how to get out of the bottle hmm
now what to do the next thing I was wondering about is if I could entice the
chipmunk to go down into the bottle that's already standing up so I put some
bait near the neck
I guess the angle here is not quite right to get in there from the top
Oh neat two chipmunks on there at the same time
oh hi dear friend ah this bottle is mine who would have thought that such cute
little creatures can be vicious
after that I experimented some more to see if I could get the bottle to tip
with a chipmunk in it I figure if the bottle could be made to tip against
something solid and that could be used to actually trap the chipmunk but just
getting the bottle to tip reliably with the chipmunk innit was pretty tricky and
then I had the idea of maybe making the bottle tip onto the chipmunk but that
didn't work either
and after that I set up just a fun little challenge just to see how the
chipmunk would deal with it I think there is lots more room for experiments
you