What is living in my Hydrangea garden?

[khatter]

Hello everyone,

It appears that something has taken up lodging in my hydrangea garden. Any thoughts as to what this might be? I am aware there is a very old tree stump in this garden, and I just worked around it over the years and planted a nice hydrangea bush. These hydrangeas have been in this garden for about 4 years.

About a week ago, we noticed a little pile of wood mulch now, there is a huge pile of wood mulch. Now there are a couple of big piles of mulch. The mulch is more like a nugget shape rather than a wood chip. We found a hole about the side of a golf ball, neatly under a rock, close to the mystery wood chip/nugget pile. (see pics). Very curious to know what kind of scoundrel we are sharing our garden with. Please tell me it's NOT a rat hole. What do you think this could this be?

Sorry about the pic quality, taken with my cell phone...

[B_BQ]

From my experience you could very well have a chipmunk getting his condo organized for the winter!

A couple of weeks ago we noticed that there was suddenly quite a large amount of very fine gravel at one of the corners of an interlocking brick set of steps. I swept it all away, couldn't see anything, but the pile was back the next day, even larger. My husband took apart the interlocking brick steps and low and behold there was a series of tunnels and rooms organized inside the steps!!!!
It was quite beautiful and they'd done a good job - albeit in the wrong place as far as we were concerned. We set about putting it right, with reinforcing hardware cloth at key points. For the next couple of days two chipmunks vented their anger at us, but eventually settled down, probably because they'd started to get their winter residence organized somewhere else in my garden!
~BBQ