Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 8, 1994 TAG: 9401080142
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELLEN YAN NEWSDAY
DATELINE: GREAT NECK, N.Y. LENGTH: Medium
One midnight - if you will, hum "The Twilight Zone" theme - the pointy-nosed head of a flying squirrel peeks from the curtain tops in Lee Elmer's home.
Picture host Rod Serling standing by the flowered, orange curtains in Elmer's living room, near the window scarred by an untamed animal trying to escape.
"Lee Elmer is a woman who traps house insects with jars and waits for the postman to come and free them outside," Serling might say in his careful enunciation.
"For two weeks, a flying squirrel trapped in her house turns into a nocturnal terrorist, raiding Elmer's kitchen drawers, nibbling on cream-filled wafers and careening across her rooms. Lee Elmer lives alone and until the creature is caged and taken away by a wildlife volunteer, she will be tested to the limits of her endurance. She will ask herself: Is she hearing a noise? Or is she going crazy?"
It began one December midnight, as Elmer chatted in the living room with Trudi, a friend who stays overnight a couple nights a week after teaching classes nearby.
Elmer, a business retiree in her early 70s, glanced toward the window and cried out, "Look!"
The squirrel, just its head visible beneath the ceiling, sat staring back. But then, apparently disturbed by Elmer's hopping up from her chair, the creature jumped from its perch and glided across the living room.
Elmer ran upstairs, but Trudi knew the creature for what it was because three weeks earlier, on television, she saw a flying squirrel on a nature program.
The night the squirrel prompted her to race upstairs and hide, Elmer called police. "I said, `I'm alone. I'm miserable. I can't take it,' " she recalled. "He talked to me like, `Little old lady. We're going to humor her.' "
The cop came, a young guy. As he was there, the squirrel scrambled across the mantelpiece beneath the drapes and dashed into an open kitchen cabinet. The guy turned white, Elmer said. "Six-foot-four. Was absolutely devastated. He was petrified, more than I, and he didn't have to live with it. I almost laughed."
After that night, Elmer's path crossed that of the nocturnal creature again and again. Opening a kitchen drawer. Closing the orange drapes. Waking up. Hearing noises everywhere. The unseen menace gnawed at her nerves.
"I would come home and put the key in the door and wonder, `Is it going to come at me?' I wished it was a lion. I could deal with a lion. It's tangible."
It became so nerve-wracking that Elmer feared to even twitch the curtain aside to look out the window. She took the advice of friends - buy peanuts, seeds, dried fruit to trap it - and called so many agencies and animal lovers' groups that she lost count.
"I have a flying squirrel in the house," she told one librarian. "I want to know what you know about it."
She learned that flying squirrels possess flaps of skin connecting their legs, and when they spread their legs and jump, it seems as if they're flying.
Finally, Elmer called a private company and a man came out with two huge cages, set with peanut butter.
Three nights before New Year's Day, as Elmer slept, the flying creature got trapped in one of the cages.
Elmer still was in a bind because the trapper was away for the holiday. She wouldn't go near the cage. "This was the worst, having it caught in a little space," she said.
Finally, she reached the Volunteers for Wildlife in Huntington, N.Y. The volunteer who answered the phone, a teacher, apparently heard the end-of-the-rope desperation in Elmer's voice. It was bad weather, but the volunteer said, "Let me just put on my shoes."
At its office, the wildlife group has been nursing the rodent back to health in an animal incubator. "He came in quite stressed out, cold and dehydrated," said Executive Director Sallie Ruppert. "It wouldn't have lived much longer if it had not been brought in."
This week, a volunteer called Elmer to ask, "Would you like us to release it near you or here?"
Elmer replied, "Please not near me."
by CNB