It was a “Rocky” road.
A squirrel in Germany had to be rescued by firefighters after getting its head lodged in a manhole cover, as seen in incredible photos going viral online.
A Facebook post detailing Rocky’s ridiculous predicament is blowing up online.
“A squirrel was peeping out of a gully lid,” the Dortmund Fire Brigade, which executed the rescue, wrote in the post. “It was stuck and didn’t come forward or backward.”
Accompanying photos show the red squirrel with its head and arms protruding out from the manhole cover’s hole as if caught in miniature medieval stocks.
Rescuers had been alerted to the creature’s plight by a Samaritan, who had spotted the imperiled critter peering out of a hole in the road in Dortmund’s Horde district Monday afternoon.
The passerby tried to extract the rodent from its impromptu prison but gave up after the nut muncher tried to bite her.
She then “covered the animal with a scarf so it could calm down and called the fire department for help,” per the Facebook post.
Firefighters arrived shortly thereafter and lifted the lid, before attempting to “carefully free the scared animal from the hole.”
This proved quite the challenging feat as the squirrel was reportedly “not cooperative.”
At long last, responders managed to free the acorn hoarder, after which the varmint disappeared up a nearby tree unharmed.
The fire brigade said it was unsure whether this was the same squirrel that they’d liberated from a sewer cap four years prior.
Red squirrels don’t have a monopoly on getting trapped in manhole covers.
In 2019, a chonky rat had to be rescued by an entire team of firefighters after she became stuck in a sewer grate in Bensheim, Germany.