Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
When the sun goes down, a mouse comes out of hiding. It scurries onto a table in 75-year-old Rodney Holbrook's shed and begins to clean up.
This mouse is small but mighty. With its tiny mouth it picks up nails, cable ties – even a screwdriver – and stores them away. It places each piece individually in a tray.
“This happens every night without fail,” Holbrook said as he wolfed down toast Monday between media interviews about the mouse, who has become famous since being caught on camera. Holbrook and the mouse live in Powys, Wales.
“I was inundated,” he said, with questions about the rodent he calls “Welsh Tidy Mouse.” “I’ve been getting calls now, but I’m not going to answer them – I’m talking to you.”
Their story began in October, when Holbrook ventured into the shed in his backyard one day and discovered that the bird seed he had stored there had been stuffed into a pair of shoes. “Something strange is happening here,” he remembers.
To find out what happened after dark, he set up a camera. As he watched the footage, he noticed that every evening a little mouse would get to work, moving items he had left behind into a short-sided box – essentially cleaning out his shed.
Holbrook, an avid nature photographer, described the rodent's behavior as “unbelievable” and said it had been going on for months. “It’s incredible to do this every night,” he said.
“You think it would get fed up,” he said of the creature.
Welsh Tidy Mouse isn't the first of her kind to seem as obsessed with cleaning as Disney's Remy is with cooking in Ratatouille.
In 2019, a mouse was filmed moving objects in a man's shed in Bristol, England. The rodent was reportedly nicknamed the “Brexit Mouse” by the owner of the shed. joked that they were supplies for Britain's exit from the European Union.
Holbrook knows the original Tidy Mouse and said he nicknamed his visitor the “Welsh Tidy Mouse” as a nod to his location so people don't confuse the two.
Most of the time, the rodent works alone, although it sometimes has accomplices, Holbrook said. In one clip, he spotted two more mice joining in the nighttime cleanup.
Gareth Davies, founder of Wales-based Pest and Property Solutions, said the mouse exhibited such behavior probably because the animals were “miniature hoarders”.
“If I’m honest, they’re very funny creatures,” he said. “Mice are very curious and hoarding animals. They love hoarding food and everything else. It's in their nature; They are completely different from rats.”
Davies, who viewed the footage, said he was skeptical that the mouse was intentionally “cleaning up” and that it was probably just exhibiting the behavior of a “mass forager.”
It looks like a wood mouse or a house mouse, Davies said, and both species exhibit hoarding behavior. “They love to drag things; They are like the magpie from the rodent family,” he said.
However, Holbrook has his own theories. “Maybe it’s just a bit of fun,” he said. Or the mouse could take pity on him as he recovers from prostate cancer. Maybe the mouse is thinking, “Poor man, he's so tired I'm going to do it for him,” Holbrook joked.
Davies warned that while Holbrook had welcomed his guest, the situation could escalate as mice tend to “multiply very quickly”.
Holbrook is more worried that the regular nightly guest might not be there forever. “I spotted a tawny owl in the tree the other day,” he said, expressing concern that his troublesome friend might fall prey to the bird.
On social media, many were quick to express their admiration for the organized rodent, branding it “cute” with the potential to become “a great children's entertainment.”
“I need a Welsh Tidy Mouse in my life,” read one tweet. The mouse was named “Minnie Kondo” in the British media, after Marie Kondo, the queen of cleanliness.
Holbrook said his wife, Linda, “loves” the mouse and “finds it really funny.” There's only one downside, he said: She's now too scared to go into the shed.