Chipmunk's cage building

Essential quality of a chipmunk cage is the height and thus low and wide cages made for guinea-pigs, rabbits and hamsters are not good cages for chipmunks. From petshops you may find some big bird-cages and they might be suitable for chipmunks, but usually they are also too small cages. Generally the easiest and the cheapest way to get a suitable cage for chipmunks is to build a cage by yourself. The building of a suitable cage is quite easy, but it demands of course a little of your own time and trouble.

The height of the cage has to be at least one meter, but preferably more. On many chipmunk web pages it's said that the wire distance of the cage net should be 10-12 mm. However, seven week old chipmunks do usually already keep inside the cage, although the wire distance of the cage net would be even 20 mm.

If there is more than one chipmunk in one cage, my recommendation is that the cubic contents of the cage should be at least half cube meter multipling by the number of the chipmunks. The sufficient cage space is important for the reason that each chipmunk needs its own territory and if there is not enough the space the chipmunks get easily stressed and aggressive. Anyway, if you have more than one chipmunks you have to be prepared for the thing that later you may have to build an own cage for everyone - temporarily or permanently. Temporarily you can use also smaller cages during the cage cleaning or if a chipmunk has hurt itself you can limit its exercise by putting the chipmunk in the smaller cage for a few weeks.

When you build the whole chipmunk cage by yourself, your imagination is the only restrictive factor to the end result. There is no one and only solution in the cage building. You don't have to build the whole cage only from wire net, but you can also use for example plywood and wood laths. However, the cage may not be any kind of terrarium or aquarium, because chipmunks have to get climb up along the cage wall.

The size of my first home-made chipmunk cage was 200 cm (height) x 100 cm (width) x 50 cm (depth). For this cage I used about 14 meters of wire net in which the width of the net was 50 cm and the wire distance was 19mm, about 25 meters of thick support wire, over 100 meters thin wire (with that I tied up the thick support wire to the wire net pieces) and linoleum piece as a bottom of the cage (size of 110 cm x 60 cm). On the bottom of the cage there is no wire net so that you can change easily the bottom papers only by picking up the whole cage.

The cage interior can be also decorated and furnished by your imagination. The bigger cage the better possibilities you have for the interior designing. To the corners you can build for example wire net planes or plywood planes with different height situations and from net holes you can thread through some tree twigs so that the chipmunks can jump on them. Besides, it's good to keep always some tree twigs (for example willow twigs) in a chipmunk cage so that the chipmunks have always something harder to gnaw. In principle, there should be always an own nest for each chipmunk, but practically they often sleep together in a same nest. You can put big stones to the bottom of the cage, if you want to render the wearing of the nails more effective. Also a bigger tree branch (look the photo beside) keeps fine in position, if you set it into Christmas-tree holder.

Chipmunks like to dig in soil, in sand and in other soft grounds. So if you want to give someting entertaining for your chipmunks, you can put one or more boxes at the bottom of the cage and fill them with thick moss layer or with mixture of soil, turf and sand. For example my chipmunks have had often in the summer time some boxes filled with moss layer of 10 cm and they have been always very enthusiastic about them. Sometimes they have dig themselves completely in the moss, but most frequently they only used to hide their food storages from their cheeks under the moss. When I give new seed mixture food to their dishes, there will often start a great show as all the chipmunks race from food dishes to moss boxes and back and try to storage all the food in their hide places as soon as possible. Above there is a photo of the death of the easter grass taken on 11.4.2002. The photo has been taken only one minute after I put the fine grass in the cage and let chipmunks start their duty around the grass. ;-)

On the right side in the photo you can see a "play cottege" made by the father of Katja Seppänen. The play cottege has been very popular with Katja's chipmunk boys always when they have been allowed to run free outside their cage. You can also put toilet paper rolls and household rolls in the cage for chipmunks' fun and if you want to facilitate the nest building of the chipmunks you can put some toilet paper or something corresponding in the cage so that the chipmunks can gather them to the cushion of their nest.

Don't put any rodent wheel in the chipmunk cage (at least I wouldn't recommend that). Although chipmunks usually like to run very much, their tail can cut off, if they are allowed to run in a rodent wheels.

If it is possible, you can also move your chipmunk cage in outdoors in the summer time, because chipmunks aren't sensitive to cold. If you have more than one chipmunks in the same cage, they do keep each other warm, even though the temperature would go sometimes slightly below zero. I have never kept my own chipmunks in outdoor cages, but I do know several chipmunk owners from Finland who keep their chipmunks in outdoors in the summer time.