Is That Chip, or Is It Dale?

Somewhere at this moment, Pluto is probably running somewhere to hide.  Sure, it's not like I was hunting down a Lion in the Serengeti, creeping up on a Tiger in Bangladesh or stalking a Grizzly in Alaska, but if you ask Mickey Mouse's best friend, he'll tell you that there is nothing more dangerous than a chipmunk.  I was sitting in the backyard on a swing while visiting my parents and hoping to snap off a few shots of the many birds that visit her feeders.  For some reason, they all came down with a severe case of camera shy as not one bird decided it needed to grab some seeds or to take a little afternoon bath.  On the verge of getting pretty frustrated over the lack of feathered models, this industrious little guy came up from his hiding spot and decided that it was his turn to shine.  I already had the 70-300mm on my camera as I was positioned a fair distance away from the bid feeders and wanted to make sure that I would be able to get the shots I needed.  The only problem now was to try and turn myself the 90 degrees necessary to capture my new model without scaring him back to his hiding spot under the pool. I managed to turn myself around and started to snap away.  Suddenly, something spooked the Chipmunk and he scurried back to the hole.  I took the opportunity to check out the shots that I had taken and everything seemed grainy.  I quickly checked the info and much to my disgust, the ISO was set at
 1600.  I had done it again, started taking pictures without changing the ISO.  I quickly reset the ISO to 100 and deleted the pictures while cursing myself under my breath.  Thinking I had blown my shot and getting ready to go back and hunt some Bumblebees, I caught something moving from the corner of my eye.  My little chipmunk was back and was ready for action.  Second time is the charm.  In order of appearance, the pictures were shot at the following settings.  f/9, 1/100sec, ISO100 at 300mm.  f/9, 1/125sec, ISO 100 at 300mm.  f/9, 1/100sec, ISO 100 at 300mm and finally f/9, 1/125sec, ISO 100 at 300mm.  As everything was shot at 300mm, it's pretty obvious that some cropping was going to be necessary.  I also had to play with Levels a little bit with the first shot to bring out a little more colour in my subject.  The only thing that I couldn't get rid of was the black tube that was coming out of the pool.  My photoshopping isn't quite good enough to make something that size disappear and cropping it out wasn't possible as the chipmunk would no longer be properly framed in the photograph.  So, the tube stays in the picture.  I've actually kind of grown to like it, just a little bit.  It adds an obstacle for the chipmunk to look over.  I had hoped to grab a few more shots before calling it a day, so I went back inside and grabbed some bread and nuts, hoping to give the little critter something more to eat than some twirly birds that were on the ground.  I spread them around the ground, as far away from the pool tube as possible, and waited for my buddy to return for his snack, but to no avail.  He was now all the way at the other end of the pool, and didn't budge.  I was starting to look like rain, so I decided to return inside and pack away my gear.  I went to the backyard one final time to make sure that I hadn't left anything behind and all of the bread and nuts I had spread around were gone.  That little trickster managed to gather up all of that food in about ten minutes of times.  I guess that means it was Chip after all.