Wildlife photographer and retired mailman Rodney Holbrook, 75, had a strange problem: Items he left out on his workbench when he was done for the day were being put away overnight.
Eventually Holbrook, from Builth Wells, Powys, Wales, decided to figure out what was going on. So he got a night-vision camera and mounted it in his shed to see what was happening.
It turned out he had an unsolicited housekeeper — or perhaps it should be “mousekeeper.”
A hard-working rodent was caught on camera gathering the nuts and bolts, the pins and pegs, and cable ties and tucking them safely in a box on the workbench.
“It has been going on for months. I call him Welsh Tidy Mouse,” Holbrook told the BBC. “At first, I noticed that some food 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 Guardian reported that Holbrook started leaving out different items to see what the helpful creature could lift. Tidy Mouse seemed up to whatever task confronted it.
“He moved all sorts of things into the box. Bits of plastic, nuts and bolts. I don’t bother to tidy up now, as I know he will see to it,” he said in the article. “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.”
BBC reported that the Welsh Tidy Mouse is Holbrook’s second encounter with a clean-freak mouse. A few years ago, when Holbrook lived in Bristol, a friend asked for his help to set up a night camera to see what was going on in his shed. Holbrook’s friend thought he was either getting forgetful or he was being haunted.
So back in 2019, they mounted a camera and captured video of another tidy rodent.
Holbrook told BBC he thinks that Welsh Tidy Mouse is stacking items in the box on his workbench to hide his stash of nuts. And it’s working.