Tips About How To Kill Chipmunks

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The good news is that you don’t need a permit to trap and kill chipmunks. There isn’t a limit on how many you can trap or kill either. The bad news, however, is that killing chipmunks isn’t always the best way to deal with the problem. Let us explain why …



Let’s take a look at the time of year. Is it April or May — spring time? If yes, there’s a good chance the chipmunk you come across will be females with babies in a nest. Mothers tend to have four or five babies around this time, and they won't leave the nest to start their own lies for a good five or six weeks after they are born. If you manage to locate and kill the mother in that time, the babies will die too. They won't die in a trap, however, or somewhere else easy to find and clean up, they'll die in their burrows somewhere underground, and this could mean under your home or other structures on your land. If you leave those babies there, the decomposing bodies will start to attract other animals, particularly rats and mice, and you may even find that you have maggots and flies after a while too. That's before we think about the smell. In many cases, homeowners aren't even away they had wild animal problems at all, until the animal died and started to kick-up an awful stench.

If you are sure that you *don’t* have a family of chipmunks, rather than just the one chipmunk, you can look at lethal snap traps. These are a much ‘cleaner’ option than trapping the animal with a live cage trap and then destroying the creature yourself.

As well as snap traps, the traditional kind of lethal trap often used to cull smaller creatures, such as rats and mice, you can also look at electrocution traps. These are, once again, similar to the electrocution traps that are designed to destroy rat and mouse infestations. These can be quite expensive to keep running, especially if you don't manage to capture the little beast for a while. The batteries or mains-operated running costs will soon mount up, on top of the price of the device itself. You will also need to take into consideration the fact that these traps might just trap and kill other small creatures too, many of which you would rather have left alone. This can include small kittens, rats, mice, babies of all animals that are not still in their nests, and even snakes or lizards.



There are ‘homemade’ trap and kill approaches you can take, but we would recommend these approaches the least. A bucket of water with a small wooden ramp covered in sunflower seeds could be enough to encourage the animal to jump right in and drown itself. This is unpleasant, obviously, and not just for the animal. If you are close to the animal, you may hear it screaming for help as it slowly drowns.

The last approach we will look at when culling chipmunks is poison. Poison is even less effective with chipmunks than it is for rats and mice, and this is because the animal is well known for storing food. If the animal takes the food and stores it for a couple of months before eating it, the poison has a chance to become less effective. It also means that the chipmunks will still be annoying you and causing damage for the time that the poison isn’t working.

Read my How to Get Rid of Chipmunks guide.
For more information, you may want to click on one of these guides that I wrote:
How To Guide: Who should I hire? - What questions to ask, to look for, who NOT to hire.
How To Guide: do it yourself! - Advice on saving money by doing wildlife removal yourself.
Guide: How much does wildlife removal cost? - Analysis of wildlife control prices.