- Ratatouille ain’t got nothing on this rodent.
We can all agree that cleaning is such a chore, with a capital C. It’d be so nice to have someone do it for you, but cleaning services cost an arm and a leg.
A Welsh man recently found someone doing his dirty work for him, and it didn’t cost him a penny. The cleaner, however, is not who you would think.
After all, it’s a lone neat freak of a mouse.
Rodney Holbrook was puzzling over why things kept moving around in his outdoor shed seemingly on their own. To get to the root of the mysterious problem, the 75-year-old set up a video camera overnight.
The footage captured a mouse dutifully tidying up Holbrook’s shed. Night after night, the rodent shows up to pick up clutter and place it in a small bin on the shed’s work desk.
It all sounds like a prelude to a Pixar movie. This one wouldn’t have as catchy a name as Ratatouille, though — Holbrook has named his rodent helper rather clinically as Welsh Tidy Mouse.
But hey, at least it’s accurate.
‘I Don’t Bother to Tidy Up Now’
Holdbrook is a retired mailman who these days entertains himself by dabbling in wildlife photography. In November 2023, strange things started happening in the backyard shed of his home in Builth Wells, Wales.
“At first, I noticed that some food that I was putting out for the birds was ending up in some old shoes I was storing in the shed,” Holbrook told the BBC.
But it wasn’t just bird food that was moving. All kinds of small objects began disappearing from where Holbrook had left them lying around, only to be put back in their place.
To figure out what was going on, Holbrook turned to his photography equipment. He set up a video camera with a night vision lens in his shed to see who was touching his stuff.
His efforts quickly produced results. Holbrook’s video revealed a very neat mouse had moved into the shed.
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw that the mouse was tidying up,” Holbrook exclaimed to The Guardian.
For the past two months, the mouse has returned to clean up his shed. It will grab things like clothespins, screws, nuts, bolts, and corks and place them all in a small box on Holbrook’s work desk.
“It has been going on for months. I call him Welsh Tidy Mouse,” said Holbrook.
Curious, he decided to see how far the mouse was ready to go to keep the shed clean. Turns out, even screwdrivers and cable ties will end up neatly in the box.
“I don’t bother to tidy up now, as I know he will see to it. I leave things out of the box and they put it back in its place by the morning,” Holbrook said.
He Just Likes to Clean
Having the mouse in his shed is working out well for Holbrook. But why has the rodent decided to keep this particular place in perfect order?
Megan Jackson, a researcher from the University of Bristol who has extensively studied mouse behavior, noted that mice have a natural tendency to hoard food and nesting materials for a rainy day.
“That behavior is really robust, really intrinsic to mice. We see it repeated a lot,” Jackson told the BBC.
This theory might partially explain the behavior of the Welsh Tidy Mouse, but not completely. After all, screwdrivers and clothespins don’t make for a comfortable nest.
“Some of the objects that were described don’t really sound like things that would be good for building a nest. Typically, a mouse would want something that forms a really good structure and then something that would help keep it warm,” explained Jackson.
So, why does the mouse keep moving things to the box? Well, it might be that the rodent simply likes to clean.
“The mouse must know the [box] is being disturbed every day, but it is still enjoying taking the objects back to the box,” said Jackson.
What we have here is possibly just the neatest mouse in the world.
Another Shed, Another Mouse
Strangely enough, this isn’t Holbrook’s first run-in with a mouse moving things around. In 2019, he helped his friend Steve Mckears figure out what was rearranging his shed.
Mckears had noticed that the tools in his shed were not where he thought he had left them. While he entertained the idea of a poltergeist, he was honestly more worried that his advancing age was getting the better of him.
“I was worried. I’m 72 and you hear of things going wrong with 72-year-old gentlemen in the mind,” Mckears admitted to BBC at the time.
Holbrook, who back then lived in Bristol, helped his friend set up a video camera to see if he was moving things and forgetting about it. Fortunately for Mckears, his mind was as sharp as ever.
Instead of a bumbling old man, the culprit behind the moving objects was another mouse. This one wasn’t making the shed very tidy, though — it was simply moving things to a big stockpile.