JERSEY SHORE, Pa. (AP) — A couple in central Pennsylvania found a very unusual critter in their backyard — a purple squirrel.

Percy Emert said he and his wife, Connie, have cage-like traps in their yard to keep squirrels away from the bird feeders. Percy Emery then releases the squirrels into the woods away from his home but joked that sometimes they make it back to his house before he does.

“I came home (one day recently) and my wife said, ‘You’re not going to believe it but I saw a purple squirrel in the yard,’” he said Thursday. “So I put out a trap with a couple of peanuts inside.”

Before too long, the squirrel came back and found itself in the trap Sunday.

“I thought, ‘Nobody’s going to believe me,” he said. “Even the inside of its ears were purple. It wasn’t like it fell into something. It didn’t look like that at all.”

The animal quickly became an online sensation and even has its own Facebook page.

After the couple released the squirrel Tuesday, Percy Emert said a state game warden came by and took samples of purple fur that the squirrel left behind inside the cage, as well as six to eight pieces of fur that Percy Emert took from the squirrel’s tail before releasing it.

“It looked like it was healthy, the only thing was that its teeth were brown,” he said.

Asked about the possibility of having this particular squirrel making its way back to his house, Emert said he thought it was unlikely.

“It’s far enough away,” he said. “Maybe we’ll hear about someone in town seeing it.”

Henry Kacprzyk, a curator at the Pittsburgh Zoo, said Thursday he thought it looked like a gray squirrel tinged in purple, after looking at a picture of the critter on an iPhone.

He knows of albino squirrels. Black squirrels. Gray squirrels. Reddish squirrels.

“But the purple coloration, from the purple I saw … it looked to me like this animal had come in contact with something with its fur and dyed its fur,” Kacprzyk said. The squirrel could have come in contact with a pokeberry patch, but pokeberries aren’t in season.

“I’ve got to think one of the suggestions might be it fell in a Porta John that had blue coloration,” he said with a chuckle. “I have no idea why … but I don’t think it was born that way.”

When asked about the suggestions by some people in online forums of the potential impact of fracking fluid, Kacprzyk said the composition of such fluids in Pennsylvania wasn’t known. “My guess there is if you don’t know something, is that there’s no scientific proof to that. … I would find it amazing that it had that kind of effect,” he said.

In general, purple is an unusual color for mammals, let alone squirrels.

“There are definitely birds that have coloration like this … but not mammals,” he said. “Mammals don’t normally uptake color, ingest something it goes through and (then) it comes out through their fur.”

Accuweather.com first reported the discovery.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida wildlife officials say a Loxahatchee man did nothing illegal by storing his dead cougar in a freezer.

Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission Capt. Jeff Arlen said on Wednesday that the owner had the appropriate permits to possess cougars and other wildlife.

An officer who investigated found no obvious signs of abuse or neglect.

A citizen was concerned that the animal had been stored in the freezer and called the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

Wildlife officers say that’s not against the law.

Owners do not have to report how or why their animals died. They also can handle the carcasses as they see fit.

Florida currently licenses 260 commercial or personal facilities to possess wildlife that could pose a significant danger. They are inspected twice a year.

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. (AP) — Officials in the Florida Everglades have captured and killed a 16-foot-long Burmese python that had just eaten an adult deer.

Scott Hardin, exotic species coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, says workers found the snake on Thursday. The reptile was one of the largest ever found in South Florida.

Hardin says the python had recently consumed a 76-pound female deer that had died. He says it was an important capture to help stop the spread of pythons further north.

On second thought, pythons would never threaten the deer population here. They’d choke on our larger whitetails, which comfortably average more than 100 pounds.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A red-tailed hawk that rescuers said was shot in the head with a nail gun was recovering Sunday at a Northern California wildlife center.

The hawk, captured in a San Francisco park by rescuers Saturday, was doing “very well” while being cared for at the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley in San Jose, said Rebecca Dmytryk, executive director of the Monterey-based group WildRescue.

“The nail dislodged and dropped out during transport with no sign of additional trauma and no bleeding,” Dmytryk said.

The juvenile bird was trapped Saturday evening at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens. It was immediately transported to the wildlife center where specialists stayed late to receive it, Dmytryk said.

WildRescue had been notified of the injured bird nearly a week ago and had tried to trap it several times last week without success.

But observers got close enough to the bird to see the nail extending from its cheek through the front of its head. They said the hawk appeared to be in pain.

Dmytryk’s group had been using a trap called a bal-chatri, a trap made of wire mesh, to try to catch the injured hawk.

Rescuers believe someone intentionally hurt the hawk earlier this month. A reward of $10,000 has been offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whomever harmed the bird.

She has said that wild birds like hawks are protected, and that it’s a felony to try to capture the birds without a license.