A quick-thinking New Yorker saved a calico kitten which was found in a Mercedes car engine.

The Brooklyn photographer Antonia M. Rosario spotted the trapped kitten as he drove along the city’s Ocean Parkway with his wife.

“In the adjacent lane, I see a Mercedes s550 with its left front turn signal light missing from the housing. In this housing is the little face of a kitten crying,” Rosario explained via his Internet blog.

Acting in spur of the moment, he alerted the driver of the car to pull over, after which point she explained that she didn’t know how to open the car’s bonnet.

Rosario continued: “I can see the kitten sitting inside the housing where the turn signal lamp should be. She’s staring at me and I reach in to grab her and she disappears further into the engine.”

Fearing that the heat from the engine might kill the cat, more people gathered around the vehicle to help. “Two guys get into the car and are searching for the hood release while I’m trying to reach in for the kitten. We all have iPhones, so we start Googling how to open the hood of an s550.”

Luckily, the combined efforts went to plan and the kitten was free. Rosario said: “She first poked her head out of the hole. I told everyone to be quiet so we wouldn’t scare her back into the engine. Finally she dropped one leg down then another… Gotcha!”

The timing couldn’t have been any better: “If we had been a minute off in any direction, this would never have happened,” Rosario expressed, as he explained how lucky he was to have even discovered the cat.

Since the incident, Rosario has taken the kitten – who’s said to be in good health – to his home, after being asked: “Are you going to keep her?” by a bystander at the scene. The photographer has since documented the tale via his blog and has garnered his pet – suitably named Mercedes – a sizable Internet following.

Here’s Mercy doing just fine…