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Chipmunk

Gilles Gonthier/Flickr Creative Commons

On my weekly nature walk through the forest last Thursday, a small set of four footprints in a muddy divot caught my attention. Irvine Nature Center’s naturalists and I took an up-close look and we concluded that the tracks were from an eastern chipmunk.

And even more peculiar, we were quite positive that the tracks are from a male chipmunk. 

“How,” another staff member asked our group, “can you possibly tell the sex of an animal just from what you see in this mud?” It was, of course, a great question.

W. Brooks Paternotte took the helm of Irvine Nature Center as executive director in July 2013 and immediately began building on the strong 35-year foundation. Brooks is a Baltimore native who was a teacher, coach, advisor, dean and Head of the Middle School during his 13 years at Boys’ Latin School in Baltimore. He is also an instructor and ambassador of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and is a Leave No Trace Master, as well as an avid outdoorsman and a features writer for FlyLife Magazine.