WATCH: Man captures video of mouse cleaning up his shed every night
Mice are widely considered to be dirty creatures, but it seems that one particular mouse in Cardiff, Wales has a knack for keeping things neat and tidy.
According to a report by BBC, when wildlife photographer Rodney Holbrook began to notice that objects he had left scattered in his shed the night before were mysteriously put back tidily in a box, he decided to catch whoever it was that was doing it.
After he had installed a night vision camera in the shed, he captured a scene that appeared to have come straight out of the 2007 animated movie Ratatouille: a mouse was seen gathering clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts, and placing them in a box on Holbrook’s workbench.
Mouse filmed tidying up man's shed every night’
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Despite being an avid wildlife photographer, retired postman Rodney Holbrook never expected to capture a Ratatouille-style scene unfolding in his own shed.
After regularly discovering that things from the night before had been… pic.twitter.com/w2G7TdNI8i
"It has been going on for months. I call him Welsh Tidy Mouse. 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, so I set up a camera," the 75-year-old photographer recalled.
Wanting to experiment on how far the small rodent would clean his table, Holbrook shared that he left out different objects to see if the mouse could lift them, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that the critter would even carry cable ties to 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. Ninety-nine times out of 100 the mouse will tidy up throughout the night," he said.
"It really was amazing to see the footage, some of the things that it tidies away are really unusual, I think he would tidy my wife away if I left her in there!" he joked.
This is not the first time that a mouse has been caught doing things that are out of the ordinary. A similar incident was discovered in 2019 in Bristol, England when a mouse was caught "stockpiling" items such as screws and metal objects in a man's shed.