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The mouse “repairs” the place daily
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- Author: Charlie Buckland
- Scroll, BBC News
1 hour ago
Despite his hobby of photographing wildlife, retired postman Rodney Holbrook never expected to capture a Ratatouillestyle scene in his own garage.
He decided to install a night vision camera in the warehouse after frequently noticing mysterious changes in the arrangement of items stored there.
Holbrook took pictures of a mouse collecting clothespins, corks, nuts and screws scattered around the garage and putting them in a box.
He nicknamed the rodent “Welsh Tidy Mouse,” an expression that loosely translates into Portuguese as “organized Welsh mouse.”
Holbrook, 75 years old and from Builth Wells, a town in Wales, says the cleanup ritual has been going on for two months.
“First, I realized that some of the food I provided for the birds ended up in old shoes I kept in the garage,” he says.
Credit, Animal News Agency
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Rodney Holbrook, 75, couldn't believe the night camera footage
“99 times out of 100, the mouse cleans up at night,” he says.
“It's really great that he's getting everything back under control. I think it’s possible they might like that.”
Holbrook believes the mouse is using the items to hide nuts, and so far the plan has worked in his favor.
“Now I don’t worry about cleaning up, I leave the things out of the box and he puts them back in their place in the morning,” he says.
“I think he would even fix my wife if I left her there,” he jokes.
Credit, Animal News Agency
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The mouse puts all the items back in the box on the counter
No objects seem to bother the mouse as it was even caught wearing nylon cable ties.
“It was actually an experiment. I put different things on the table to see if he could lift them,” he says.
But this isn't the first time Holbrook has heard stories about a “cleaning” rodent.
In 2019, while living in Bristol in the west of England, a friend also noticed a mouse keeping his garage tidy.
“That video went viral and went around the world,” he says.
“It was hard to believe that years later the same thing would happen here in Builth Wells.”