Chipmunk Removal in Ithaca, NY

Chipmunks in your Ithaca home

Eastern chipmunks run Ithaca's edges: the stone walls that terrace the hill lots, the gorge-rim trails, garden borders and the dry soil right against foundations. A chipmunk burrow looks modest — a clean hole about two inches across with no soil pile, because the animal carries the dirt away in its cheek pouches — but the system below can run for yards, with chambers for sleeping, storage and young, all excavated a mouthful at a time.

One chipmunk is a garden character. A colony working one foundation for several seasons is an engineering problem: soil leaves from under stoops, sidewalks, porch footings and the bases of retaining walls, and the voids left behind let concrete settle and crack. On steep Ithaca lots, where walls and steps are already holding back a hillside, that missing soil matters sooner.

The stone walls of the hills

Ithaca's older lots are laced with dry-laid stone walls, and every wall is chipmunk housing with a view. The gaps between stones open into burrows in the bank behind, lookouts sit on the warm top stones, and a wall colony can watch the whole garden while staying a foot from cover. Walls near bird feeders do especially well, on a diet of spilled sunflower seed. When a wall starts to lean or a section slumps, chipmunk excavation behind it is one of the first causes our crew checks.

What the digging does under concrete

Chipmunks choose the soil right at a foundation because it is dry, sheltered by the eave and easy to dig. Unfortunately that is also the soil supporting your stoop, your front walk and the edge of a patio. Burrow chambers under a slab leave it bridging a void; the first hard winter heaves it, and by spring the step rocks. The damage is slow and cumulative, which is why it gets dismissed — until the year three separate walks on the same lot need resetting.

Chipmunks, voles and other small holes

Not every small hole is a chipmunk's. The lawn damage Ithaca homeowners blame on moles is usually voles — surface runways and chewed plant bases — while chipmunk sign is the clean, soil-free hole at a wall, step or foundation, with the animal itself seen using it all day. The distinction matters because the fixes differ entirely. Our crew identifies which small digger you actually have before recommending anything; treating a vole problem as chipmunks wastes a season.

A day-active animal with seasons

Chipmunks are strictly daytime animals, busiest in the morning, and they raise litters in spring and often again in summer in the burrow's deep chamber. In winter they mostly sleep below ground, waking to eat from their stores — so a quiet January wall does not mean the colony moved away. Removal work is timed to the active months, when the colony's full extent — every entrance, every member — can be accounted for before closure begins.

How removal and closure work

The colony, not the individual, is the job. Our crew maps every entrance along the wall or foundation, handles the animals as part of work done under the DEC nuisance wildlife control operator license, and then closes the system: entrances filled and capped, vulnerable runs of foundation or wall base protected with buried mesh that digging cannot pass. Sealing first with animals still working the burrow just moves the digging six feet sideways, so the order — remove, then close — is the whole method.

Feeding the problem by accident

Bird feeders are chipmunk feeders in most Ithaca yards. Seed spilled at the base of a feeder, steps from a stone wall, is a reliable daily ration that lets a colony grow past what the lot would otherwise support. Moving feeders away from walls and foundations, cleaning up spill, and storing seed in sealed metal cans will not end an established colony on their own — but after a removal, those habits are what keep the wall empty instead of re-colonized by June.