Arrival of new babies is usually the busiest time for a chipmunk mother. As soon as the young ones are weaned out, she gets busy building new nest for her offspring.

And so it happens that my good friend Nancy is at the moment doing the very thing each self-respecting chipmunk mother does this time of the year. Today, she started collecting the softest grass and weeping willow flowers for the new bedding material. Each time she collected a bunch she hurried back to her kids’ new burrow to deposit it. When she got tired of it, she proceeded to collect sunflower seeds and grapes from our communal dish at the big stone deck.

By the time the day was over, all her little munchkins were already in their new location, poking their heads from the crevices between the stones of small stone patio, few yards away from Nancy’s burrow. She will probably stay with them for a while, and when they will get use to to their new surroundings she will move on and start cleaning and renovating her own house.