New mammal in Central Park

Photo by Bob Levy 7/23/06
The Eastern American Chipmunk is not a rare mammal in the Northeast. Indeed, chipmunks are commonly found in many other New York City parks as well as in the countryside surrounding the city. But for some mysterious reason these small members of the Squirrel family are extremely rare in Central Park. There have been no more than a handful of sightings here during the last century. That's why the discovery of a chipmunk near Turtle Pond last Sunday by Bob Levy was big news. Bob, the author of Club George: the Diary of a Central Park Bird-watcher and an occasional correspondent on these pages, not only caught sight of a chipmunk, but he also managed to get a reasonably good photo, leaving no room for doubt that it was really a chipmunk he saw. The mystery of how it got to Central Park and how it will fare there in the future is unresolved. Our other new mammal, the little Red Squirrel, has made it for his first year. Perhaps he and the chipmunk could pool resources and put a Personals ad in the Village Voice or the New York Review of Books:

Seeking mates: two lonely, unattached rodents. Object: sex. Unfortunately we can't do it together. While we're both in the same family [Sciuridae] we're in different genera, the striped one of us being a Tamias, the red one a Sciurus.

PS I found the following, completely uncharacteristic comment in the Eastern American Chipmunk account of Walker's Mammals of the World- Sixth Edition - Volume II , by Ronald M. Nowak, surely one of the driest of all scholarly works:

"[The eastern chipmunk] is an entertaining little animal and if encouraged with food and protection, it becomes tame. It makes a pleasing pet."