- author, Charlie Buckland
- scroll, BBC News
Despite his hobby of wildlife photography, retired postal worker Rodney Holbrook never expected to capture an anime-style scene Ratatouille In your garage.
He decided to install a night vision camera in the warehouse after repeatedly noticing mysterious changes in the arrangement of objects stored there.
This is how Holbrook recorded images of a mouse collecting clothespins, corks, nuts and bolts scattered around the garage and placing them in a box.
He nicknamed the rodent “Welsh Tidy Mouse,” an expression that means something like “Welsh Tidy Mouse” in the free translation into Portuguese.
Holbrook, 75 years old, from the town of Builth Wells in Wales, says that the arrangement ritual has been going on for two months.
“First, I realized that some of the food I was putting out for the birds ended up in some old shoes I kept in the garage,” he says.
“Ninety-nine times out of 100, a mouse will tidy up during the night,” he says.
“It's really cool that he puts everything back in the box, I think they might like it.”
Holbrook believes the mouse uses objects to hide the nuts, and so far the scheme has worked to his advantage.
“I don't worry about tidying up now, I leave things out of the box and he puts them back in the morning,” he says.
“I think it would fix my wife if I left her there,” he joked.
Nothing seemed to bother the mouse, as it was caught carrying nylon cable ties.
“It was actually an experiment. I brought different things to the table to see if he could lift it,” he says.
But this isn't the first time Holbrook has heard stories of rodents “cleaning up.”
While living in Bristol, western England, in 2019, a friend also noticed a mouse was tidying up his garage.
“That video went viral and went around the world,” he says.
“It was hard to believe that the same thing would happen here in Builth Wales years later.”
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