When rescuers at the Cape Wildlife Center first saw a photo of the tiny flying squirrel in distress, they couldn’t quite believe what they were looking at.
The poor animal’s fur was completely encased in a strange, crusty material — so much so that his rescuers could barely tell what they were seeing. But one thing was certain: the little squirrel desperately needed help.
“We couldn’t even make out what was going on,” the center later wrote on Facebook.
Once the squirrel arrived at the wildlife hospital, the heartbreaking story behind his bizarre appearance began to unfold.
It turned out that the little flying squirrel had been living inside the walls of a building — just before workers sprayed insulation foam inside.
Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, the helpless squirrel was instantly covered in the expanding foam, which hardened into a stiff shell all over his body.
The thick layer was especially heavy on his face, making it hard for him to move or even see.
“Both his front hands were also covered in it,” the center explained. “We could see that, in a desperate attempt to remove it, he’d been trying to groom it off himself.”
The medical team immediately sedated the exhausted squirrel and began the painstaking process of freeing him from his hardened prison.
Armed with Q-tips soaked in nail polish remover, they gently dissolved the spray foam bit by bit. Normally, acetone only works when the foam is still wet — so the rescuers weren’t even sure it would work at all. But they refused to give up.
Amazingly, after just 20 careful minutes, the final pieces came off.
The squirrel lost a little fur where the foam had stuck most stubbornly, but his skin underneath looked healthy. When he woke up from anesthesia, groggy but safe, it was as if a huge weight had been lifted — literally and figuratively.
Now, the resilient little flyer is resting comfortably at the Cape Wildlife Center, where he’s regaining his strength and recovering beautifully.
Once he’s healed and his fur grows back, he’ll be released back into the wild — free once again to glide through the trees, far away from sticky situations like this one.
