Seventeen-year-old Brian Genest of Auburn, Maine, may have learned a selfie lesson the hard way: Do not take photographs with squirrels. They attack.
The teen said he was walking through John Chestnut Park by Tampa, Fla., taking a break from his trip to check out colleges, when he noticed a friendly looking squirrel posed on the wooden bridge railway, the New York Post reported.
Hey, I’ll take a picture, he thought.
But the flash and click of the camera phone must have scared the animal, and it jumped on to the teen’s body, climbed under his shirt and dug in for several seconds, Brian said, the New York Post reported.
“He was just in that spot where my arm can’t reach him,” Brian recounted. “I threw myself on the ground and that scared him off.”
Brian’s mother, Paula Wright, meanwhile, helpfully snapped pictures of the entire event as it unfolded and then uploaded the images to his Instagram account, next to her son’s selfie.
“I think he got a little lesson from the squirrel that he’s not really its buddy,” she said, the New York Post reported.
Neither the squirrel nor the teen was harmed during the making of the photos, Ms. Wright said.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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