Wildlife film-maker hand rears orphaned baby palm squirrel - and it's CUTE

How's this for cute? Rob the orphaned palm squirrel is so small he can curl up inside a mug.

Wildlife documentary film-maker, Paul Williams, is nursing the orphaned baby Indian palm squirrel back to health after it got separated from its mum.

Mr Williams was in Sri Lanka's Wilpattu National Park filming leopards and ancient temples for a BBC documentary when he found Rob in a car park at night.

According to the Daily Mail, he said: 'I thought he was dead until I noticed a little twitch. I scooped up his weak, cold body and warmed him in my hands.

'My first thought was to try and put him back with his parents in the nest, so I put him into a safe spot as high as I could in the tree that I guessed he had fallen from."

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But when he returned, the baby squirrel was still there on his own, and Paul couldn't bear to leave him.

The crew used their thermal cameras to look for heat spots that could have been the rest of his family, but didn't find any.

So Rob went along with Paul, and he has spent a month nursing him back to health. He has kept Rob mainly in his shirt pocket, and feeds him with a plastic syringe.

Paul has uploaded a number of seriously cute pictures of Rob to his Flickr account. One shows him snoozing on his laptop, and he wrote: "A big day for Rob the baby palm squirrel - I think it's for his bed. Tomorrow his eyes may be open for the first time!"

Another pic shows him curled up snug in a mug. Paul wrote: "'Waiter! there's a squirrel in my tea.' Cuppa & a nap for Rob the baby palm squirrel."

Paul now plans on finding a solution for releasing Rob, and is looking for animal rescue centres who can continue raising him and hopefully reintroduce back into the wild.



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