What Chipmunks Should Not Eat: Bread, Nuts and Salt

Bread, salted nuts and chocolate do real harm to chipmunks. Which common garden offerings are safe, which are not, and why feeding them backfires anyway.

By Zakaria October 23, 2026 4 min read Save to Pinterest

A chipmunk sitting upright on a rock, holding a scrap of food in both front paws and eating it — Photo: 11417994, Pixabay Content License, via Pixabay

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Chipmunks will take almost anything offered, which tells you nothing about whether it is good for them. A chipmunk weighs two to five ounces, so a dose that is trivial for a dog is not trivial here.

The list, sorted by how bad it is

Common offerings, and the verdict on each

Food	Verdict	Why
Bread, crackers, cereal	Avoid	Refined starch, displaces real food
Mouldy anything	Toxic	Mycotoxins
Chocolate, coffee grounds	Toxic	Theobromine and caffeine
Avocado skin and pit	Toxic	Persin
Onion, garlic, chives	Toxic in quantity	Damages red blood cells
Raw beans	Toxic	Lectins
Salted or roasted nuts	Avoid	Salt load on a 3 oz animal
Sweets, chips, junk	Avoid	Salt, sugar, fat, additives
Milk, cheese	Avoid	Poorly digested
Apple seeds, cherry pits	Avoid in volume	Cyanogenic compounds
Plain raw walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts	Fine	Close to natural diet
Raw unsalted pistachios, almonds	Fine, small amounts	Only if genuinely unsalted
Sunflower and pumpkin seeds, raw	Fine	Natural food
Fresh fruit, berries, carrot, cucumber	Fine	Perishable, eaten not cached
Insects, mealworms	Fine	Natural and high protein

Why bread is the one that matters most

It gets offered more than everything else on that list combined, and the harm is cumulative rather than dramatic.

No useful protein, fat or minerals. A chipmunk eating bread is eating calories and nothing else
It displaces real food. A full chipmunk stops foraging, which is the problem — the natural diet it skipped is where the nutrition was
Caching makes it worse. Chipmunks store what they are given, so a steady supply of bread becomes a larder of bread
Bone problems follow a diet short on calcium and protein in a small, fast-growing animal
Mould. Bread put out and left goes mouldy quickly, and the mycotoxins in mouldy bread are actually toxic rather than merely useless

Salt is the hidden one

Nobody thinks of a handful of pistachios as dangerous. Scale it: a chipmunk is roughly one two-thousandth of a person’s weight.

Salted, roasted, honey-roasted and seasoned nuts are all unsuitable, and they are what is in almost every packet in the house. If you are putting nuts out, they have to come from the baking aisle, not the snack aisle.

What they actually eat

Worth knowing, because it is the measure of whether anything you add is an improvement.

Seeds, nuts and acorns — cached in the burrow for winter
Fruit, berries and mushrooms — eaten fresh
Buds, shoots and bulbs — which is where the garden conflict comes from
Insects, worms, snails and slugs, in quantity. Chipmunks are not vegetarian
Occasionally eggs and nestlings

A chipmunk in an ordinary garden with trees, shrubs and beds is not short of food at any point in the year. They hibernate in bouts, waking to eat from their own cache, which is why autumn caching behaviour looks so frantic.

The case against feeding them at all

This is less about the chipmunk’s diet and more about what a fed chipmunk does next.

Burrows move toward the food. That means under the patio, the path, the steps and the foundation, which is the complaint that follows
Bulbs and seedlings. A concentrated population works through tulips, crocus and newly set transplants
Numbers. A reliable food source supports more animals on the same ground
Tameness kills them. A chipmunk comfortable around people and buildings meets cats, dogs, cars and traps
It annoys the neighbours, whose patio is also in range

If you want to watch them, feed the garden instead

Plant for them rather than putting out a dish. A hazel, a serviceberry, native shrubs with berries, a log pile, leaf litter left in the beds — all of it supports chipmunks without concentrating them at one spot ten feet from your foundation.

You get the same animals to watch, and the burrow goes in the hedge bank rather than under the steps.

If you feed them anyway

Some people will, and doing it less badly is worth writing down.

Plain raw nuts and seeds only — in the shell is better, because shelling is most of what they enjoy about it
Small amounts, and let it run out between offerings
Away from the house. Twenty yards out, at a hedge or tree line, not on the patio
On the ground or a flat stone, not a feeder that also draws squirrels and rats
Clear uneaten food daily, before it moulds
Never by hand. A chipmunk that takes food from fingers bites fingers, and the bite breaks skin

Common questions

Do chipmunks eat bread?

They will eat it readily and it does them no good. Bread is refined starch with almost no protein, fat or minerals, it fills a chipmunk up in place of food that would feed it, and a diet leaning on it causes poor condition and bone problems in a small animal that stores what it is given. Mouldy bread is worse again, because the mycotoxins in it are genuinely toxic. There is no version of bread that is a good thing to put out.

Can chipmunks eat walnuts?

Yes, plain unsalted walnuts in the shell are fine and are close to a natural food — chipmunks cache nuts and a walnut is a good one. The problems are salt, flavouring and roasting in oil, all of which make a nut unsuitable. Black walnut shells are hard enough that chipmunks usually work on fallen ones at leisure rather than carrying them, which is normal behaviour rather than a problem.

Can chipmunks eat pistachios?

Plain, raw, unsalted pistachios in the shell are acceptable in small amounts. Almost every pistachio sold for people is salted or roasted in oil, and salt is the specific hazard — a chipmunk weighs a few ounces, so the salt on a handful of nuts is a serious load for its kidneys. If the packet says salted, roasted, seasoned or honey, it is not suitable.

What foods are toxic to chipmunks?

Chocolate and caffeine are genuinely toxic, as are avocado skin and pit, onion and garlic in quantity, raw beans, apple seeds and stone-fruit pits in volume, and anything mouldy. Salted and seasoned snack food is harmful without being acutely toxic. Dairy is poorly digested. The practical rule is that processed human food is unsuitable and plain raw seeds, nuts and fresh produce are not.

Should I feed chipmunks at all?

Generally no, and the reasons are about your garden as much as the animal. Feeding concentrates chipmunks around the house, which means more burrows under the patio, paths and foundation, more damage to bulbs and seedlings, and more conflict with neighbours. It also makes them tame enough to be caught by cats and hit by cars. A chipmunk in a normal garden is not short of food.

What do chipmunks eat naturally?

A wide mix, most of it high in fat and protein. Seeds, nuts and acorns, fruit and berries, mushrooms, buds and shoots, and a substantial amount of animal food — insects, worms, snails, and occasionally eggs or nestlings. They cache the storable items and eat the perishable ones as they find them, which is why a varied garden supports them with nothing added.

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