I tried the "dive&die" bucket. Complete failure because my CT munks would hang by their back legs, stretch their bodies and gobble the seeds from the water. Angry, but it was way tooo funny to watch. Anyway, after many attempts at altering the "dive&die", I gave up and ordered RAT ZAPPER ULTRA. Worth every penny!! During the day, chipmunks (avg 2 day), night, mice. The device is humane as critters don't know what hit'em AND it's clean and easy to discard the bodies without having to touch them..... When the light blinks RED, just dump'em and bury. I look forward to the light blinking red.... dark side of me, I guess. After having these munks with racing stripes eat my expensive plants, they had to go! You can buy right from mfg or ebay.... got mine on ebay.

Ah well, at least you get to TRY to exterminate them. My hubby is feeding them because "they are sooooooooooo cute." When I point out all of the holes and tunnels he just laughs and walks around singing in falsetto "I'm Chip, I'm Dale..." He is absolutely in love with squirrels and chipmunks. I was so glad NOT to have squirrels here..but my trees have now matured enough to attract them. The bunnies are bad enough but at least I can fence them out! I may need to just set up the bucket and murder a few on the sly without telling him. I'm already notorious at the house for my brutal murder of a vole with my garden rake. [gives an evil grin and wags her eyebrows a bit]. This spring when I was raking back the chickweed a vole went scurrying and I gave it a whack with the garden rake, successful in breaking its back but not killing it. It let out a scream and I yelled back at it "shut up" and hit it again until quiet was restored. Then I went looking for its relatives. I tell that story to my son's girlfriend quite often. I have NO idea why I do that... :-)

I have been able to co-exist and garden in harmony with the chipmunks in the rural area we live in Connecticut. But it seems over the last 2 years or so the chipmunks have taken advantage of any prior agreement we had ... when they started to tear up planters on a second floor bedroom deck that changfed things, but last week when i found one digging in a potted plant in our screened in porch that was the last straw! They were no longer cute, they were vermin over running our property. Checked out this site (as well as many others) for a solution. And the bucket (with the sunflower seeds) has worked, even thougfh I was sceptical at first. Better yet I may have found a solution to the squirrel intrusion problem (squirrels leaning into the bucket and scoping out seeds) ... instead of placing a board up to the bucket that serves as a diving board for the chipmunks, cover the bucket with a board that has a hole (approx 3"x3") just big enough for a chipmunk but too small for a squirrel. It worked for me! Bagged a chipmunk in first day. And there's no way a squirrel could get to the seeds.

We have chipmunks, and two cats. Usually the chipmunks get to a hole in time, and they also hide in the gutter drainpipes. Sometimes the cats do catch them, but we're always around supervising the cats (they're not allowed outside alone) and we make the cat drop the chipmunk when we see this happen. Chipmunk gets up and runs away. When cats and dogs are natural predators I don't think there's any way to make them not start to follow their instinct. But my Siamese WILL stop in her tracks when she's running after a chipmunk and I call her! She'll stop chasing and come back. Amazing.