I startled a ground squirrel while looking for something that was chirping in a fenced-off area of a park with a pair of transmission towers.
The squirrel hid, but this hawk - which I suspect was looking for the squirrel - flew out and perched on the fence for a few minutes before flying up to one of the lower struts on the nearer tower.
@kelsonv Are ground squirrels the same as chipmunks?
@zleap They're probably related, but I think the ones we have around here are more closely related to tree squirrels.
This is the iNat observation for the California Ground Squirrel I saw, just before I startled it trying to move closer for a better photo:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/89734843
And a few minutes of wiki-walking turns up that ground squirrels as a group do include chipmunks, so I guess the better answer is that they overlap, but this particular one wasn't a chipmunk!
