Mouse Tidies Up Man’s Shed Every Night, He Learns From Night Vision Footage

An unexpected nightly visitor, a mouse, emerged as an industrious secret custodian of a man’s shed. And it wasn’t the first time…

If you ever feel like you need some help with cleaning your shed, you might want to look for a furry friend who can do the job for you. That’s what Rodney Holbrook, a retired postman from Wales, discovered when he noticed that his shed was mysteriously tidied up every night.

Holbrook, who is also a wildlife photographer, was puzzled by the phenomenon and decided to set up a night vision camera on his workbench. To his surprise, he found out that a small mouse was responsible for the neatness of his shed. The mouse would pick up clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts, and put them in a tray on the shelf.

“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,” he told the BBC.

“Ninety nine times out of 100 the mouse will tidy up throughout the night. It is incredible really that they put them all back in the box, I think it’s possible that they enjoy it,” he added.

Holbrook was amazed by the mouse’s behavior and nicknamed it Welsh Tidy Mouse. He said that the mouse would tidy up almost every night without fail – and without being deterred by any object, as it was seen carrying cable ties to the pot. He experimented with leaving out different things to see if the mouse could lift them. Incredibly, the mouse put them all back in the box.

“I don’t bother to tidy up now, I leave things out of the box and they put it back in its place by the morning,” Holbrook said.

“I think he would tidy my wife away if I left her in there.”

Ludicrously, this was not the first time Holbrook has encountered a mouse tidying up a shed. In 2019, when he was living in Bristol, he filmed a similarly orderly rodent “stockpiling” items at a friend’s house. The man thought he was going mad when screws and metal objects kept reappearing in a box containing bird feed. That video also went viral.

It seems that some mice have a knack for organization and cleanliness. Maybe they are inspired by Ratatouille, the movie where a rodent secretly cooks at a restaurant. Or maybe they are just using the objects to hide away nuts, Holbrook says, adding that so far the arrangement has been working in his favor.