Chipmunk
The following is a brief excerpt from the opening chapter of a book manuscript currently in development. The final published version may differ substantially. Please do not reproduce or distribute without permission.
© 2026 Anissa Bejaoui. All rights reserved.
Part I — The Familiar Stranger
On a recent trip to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, I wandered the Hall of North American Mammals with a specific intention. I was looking for a chipmunk. I assumed it would be there — scampering among the leaves of the forest floor in the background of a diorama, perhaps, or perched on a rock near the whiskered snout of some celebrated predator. After all, there are twenty-five species of chipmunk in the world, and all but one are native to North America. They range from the boreal forests of Canada to the scrublands of Mexico, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast. In the eastern United States — where the museum sits— the eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus) is among the most commonly encountered wild mammals. You have almost certainly seen one this week, if you have a garden or a park nearby, or have walked past a stone wall anywhere in the northeastern United States.
But in the entire hall, I found not a single one.
Perhaps, I thought, the hall is reserved for larger, more charismatic mammals — the kinds of animals visitors expect to encounter taxidermied beneath museum lights: elk, bear, wolf. Their grandeur fits the scale of the displays. But then, plainly in the foreground of An August Morning in Baxter State Park, Maine, opposite an ermine, sat a vole. A vole — smaller even than a chipmunk, and less distinctive. The vole had made the cut. The chipmunk had not.
The chipmunk's absence — whether curatorial decision or trivial oversight — is, as it turns out, a fitting introduction to the animal. Utterly familiar and strangely invisible, this is the chipmunk’s particular condition—and the subject of the pages that follow.
***
For close to a century, chipmunks have posed a strangely vexing problem for zoologists: they are obviously squirrels, yet also obviously not the right kind of squirrel, and what precisely sets them apart — from squirrels, and often from one another — has proven stubbornly elusive (Piaggio & Spicer, 2000).
As noted earlier, Linnaeus himself had slotted the chipmunk neatly among the tree squirrels. But later naturalists were less certain. Constantin Rafinesque — botanist, zoologist, linguist, and chronic overreacher, a man who named so many species that colleagues openly suspected him of invention — insisted chipmunks deserved a genus of their own. He called them Tamias: "the steward," a nod to their hoarding habits. Others disagreed. Spencer Baird, the great American cataloguer of mammals, found them squirrel enough to be tucked into the ground-squirrel genus Spermophilus. Meanwhile the French zoologist Édouard Trouessart — working mostly from museum drawers, far from any living chipmunk — split the Old World species into Eutamias, "the good steward," convinced they represented a separate lineage. By the early twentieth century, some authors began applying Neotamias — "new steward" — to the diverse western North American forms in an effort to impose evolutionary order.
But instead of clarity, these new names produced fresh disagreement. Authors could not concur on which chipmunks were "primitive," which were "derived," or which warranted full genus-level recognition. The animals themselves were not helping. By the standards of mammalian diversity, chipmunk bodies are morphologically conservative (Piaggio & Spicer, 2000). Their compact forms leave little room for dramatic variation in bone, skull shape, or external markings. To any but the most practiced eye, one chipmunk looks disconcertingly like another, their differences encoded in subtleties that resist casual observation. The result has been persistent confusion and a proliferation of cryptic species groups that elude the taxonomist's best efforts to tell them apart.
Into this thicket stepped John A. White, whose sober 1953 treatise set out to resolve what Arthur Howell had already characterized, in his landmark 1929 Revision of the North American Chipmunks, as a "confused" state of affairs (p.1). Howell, for all his exasperation at chipmunk variability, had never quite questioned whether standard taxonomic tools were up to the task. White did. Before turning to the evidence, White offered a quietly radical overture: chipmunks, he suggested, cannot be judged by the broad measures applied to their larger, more tractable relatives. They require a finer scale — one calibrated to their own delicate differences — because the standard taxonomic apparatus is simply too blunt for creatures so subtle (White, 1953/2024).
Determined to put that finer scale to work, White began with the species of the subgenus Neotamias, the western form over which disagreement had become especially intense. By mid-century it had turned into a heterogeneous catch-all — a holding ground for species, subspecies, half-species, and almost-species that strained the limits of classification. What White ultimately demonstrated was that this apparent muddle concealed a more stable structure: three distinct species-level groupings — the minimus group, the quadrivittatus group, and the speciosus group — thereby revising earlier classifications built from skulls and skins and revealing that some forms long assumed to be closely related belonged, in fact, to entirely separate lineages.
His method was exacting. He turned to Ridgway's Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912) to catalogue the colours of chipmunk pelage in a dazzling lexicon: Mikado Brown, Verona Brown, Dark Mouse Gray, Hazel, Cinnamon, Bister, Pinkish Buff, Cream Buff, Ochraceous Orange, Raw Umber, Fuscous Black, Sooty Black. He remarked too how pelage alone was an insufficient marker — how individual chipmunks shift shades with age and season, and how their markings blur, overlap, and vary by region. Two chipmunks of the same species might differ by whole tones, while two of different species might be separated by nothing more than a fraction of shade. So he measured cranial breadth, traced elevational ranges — and, with great seriousness, compared their bacula. In the end it was the penis bone — an anatomical structure no longer than a grain of rice, narrow-based in Eutamias quadrivittatus and broad-based in E. umbrinus — that finally separated two species long taken to be variations on a single form. There is something quietly comic in the spectacle of an entire taxonomic tangle yielding not to grand revelation but to the patient scrutiny of the smallest possible differences. To see chipmunks clearly, it turns out, one must be willing to look very closely indeed.
Today the taxonomic uncertainties that once occupied Howell and White have not entirely disappeared. Species boundaries remain subject to revision; relationships continue to be clarified and reworked. A quick glance at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List reveals a trail of taxonomic footnotes that reads like a set of whispered corrections in the margins: formerly included in… elevated from… recognized under the genus… also known as… formerly regarded as a subspecies of… raised to full species status by… Nearly every chipmunk species carries with it an archive of revision and re-revision, each annotation a quiet admission that the group has never fully settled into the scientific imagination. Nevertheless, within the global accounting systems of conservation, chipmunks register, for the most part, as secure. They are widespread, adaptable, and, in the language of assessment, of “least concern” (IUCN, 2026). Most chipmunk species are neither threatened nor endangered, and nothing in their present condition suggests an immediate conservation crisis.
With one notable exception.
***
Back at the AMNH, the Burroughs Memorial Corridor houses a photograph taken by George Clyde Fisher — once curator of the Department of Education and first director of the Hayden Planetarium. The corridor is a quiet gallery devoted to the man who dwelt on chipmunks at length and with evident pleasure. The photograph, titled John Burroughs Providing for the Chipmunks (see Figure 2), shows Burroughs at his cabin in the Catskills, scattering seed along the stone wall where chipmunks were known to gather. Popular enough to be sold as a postcard, the image has since acquired the patina of myth: Burroughs as genial woodsman, at home among the small creatures of his daily landscape.
Fisher wrote of Burroughs that he opened "the eyes of his readers to the beauty of nature, especially of nature near at hand” (Fisher cited in American Catskills, 2023). It is a generous formulation — and an accurate one. Burroughs did more than observe chipmunks. Through the sheer accumulation of his attention, he helped establish them as fixtures of the domestic landscape, creatures of the yard and the stone wall and the cabin porch, familiar enough to be named and fed and written about with affection. He brought the wild near — and in doing so, gave the chipmunk's smallness a particular domestic tenor, a warmth that has persisted even though the essays themselves have faded from common reading.
What Burroughs could not have intended is the other side of that domestication. To make a wild animal familiar is also, in some measure, to make it ordinary. The chipmunk at the outstretched hand is charming, approachable, knowable — and precisely for those reasons, no longer quite wild. The intrusion of the wild into the domestic is supposed to ennoble the domestic (Cronon, 1996). What it can also do, over time, is quietly absorb the wild — rendering it knowable, unremarkable, small.
Chipmunks are not absent from our world. Across the landscapes they inhabit, they are everywhere. And it is precisely that — the everywhere of them, the dailiness, the taken-for-granted presence — that makes them, in the end, familiar strangers.