‘Welsh Tidy Mouse’ tidies up the little Welsh house

Something strange was going on in Rodney Holbrook’s backyard shed.

Apparently someone – or something – had been cleaning up the 75-year-old retiree for months. Every morning when he looked at his workbench, several items had been cleared away and placed in a small box nearby.

Initially some bird food and nuts were moved. Then a few screws he had left out mysteriously appeared in the box.

Mr Holbrook, a passionate wildlife photographer who lives near the town of Builth Wells in Wales, had his suspicions about the identity of the meticulous helper; at least it wasn’t his wife. To investigate, he set up a night vision camera and captured the mysterious visitor.

“Lo and behold, I have a video of the mouse,” he said. “Clean up for me.”

In videos shot by Mr. Holbrook, a little mouse carries clothespins, cups and even cable ties to the box, with enviable focus. A stick that is more than twice as long is no problem. A cork goes neatly on the stack, just like lids.

“I’m really impressed with it,” said Mr. Holbrook, a retired postal worker. “Every day I take everything out again – and it’s all back in.”

Mr Holbrook has never actually seen the mouse scurrying around, although he has given it the name ‘Welsh Tidy Mouse’. It is not the first time he has encountered a ‘neat mouse’. In 2019, Mr. Holbrook helped a friend near his hometown of Bristol, England, create images of similar mouse behavior.

Whether Welsh Tidy Mouse is deliberately scavenging is of course speculative. Mr Holbrook thinks the rodent may be trying to cover some of the nuts in the box to protect them from the eyes of other rodents.

That’s one possible explanation, according to Megan Jackson, a researcher at the University of Bristol who studies motivation using mice in laboratories. Another is that the mouse is building some kind of nest.

“We know that mice have a very strong urge to forage,” she said. Looking for interesting things in the environment to take back and hoard, she said, is “intrinsic mouse behavior.”

In her research, Dr. Jackson that she had created a similar situation in which laboratory mice were encouraged to collect nesting material and carry it back to a box. “Mice are willing to put in a lot of effort to work on something they find worthwhile,” she says.

Whatever his mission, Welsh Tidy Mouse is disciplined: the animal has rarely missed an evening of reorganizing the workbench since Mr. Holbrook noticed the behavior in October. After it skipped one night, it happened again the next night (maybe it was a sick day?).

“I wish I had the motivation,” joked Dr. Jackson. “Mice are amazing, complex creatures. I think we can learn a lot from them.”

Since sharing his findings, Mr Holbrook has been inundated with messages from people enamored with the Ratatouille-like agility of the mouse in its shed. Some have suggested that Mr. Holbrook would add some nicer objects for the mouse to organize – small furniture, for example.

“It has brought a lot of joy to some people,” he said.

But Mr. Holbrook, who tries to get outside every day, is hesitant to change things up too much. “I just want it to be natural.” Other members of the household, such as his wife, happily leave Welsh Tidy Mouse in his small home.

“She loves it,” he said. ‘But she doesn’t want to go into the shed. She is afraid of mice.”