Breaking news: Tiny mouse tidies Welsh man’s shed every night after dark! Helpful fairytale animal friends à la Snow White and Cinderella really do exist! And maybe there’s one in a shed near you!
The good news came to us when Rodney Holbrook, who fortunately enough happens to be a wildlife photographer, noticed that someone, or something, was coming in and tidying up his shed overnight. Curious about this apparently helpful poltergeist Holbrook set up a camera only to discover a real-life Disney movie was playing out in his shed.
Though Holbrook’s initial discovery was a particularly odd food storage solution—food he’d put aside for the birds repeatedly turning up in a pair of old shoes he was keeping in the shed—the camera soon revealed some much more helpful rodent housekeeping.
The little mouse who lived in his shed would come out at night and gather together every small, stray object he could find, from corks to clothes pegs to nails, only to tidy them away neatly in the tray on Holbrook’s workbench. Delighted by his little assistant, Holbrook took to leaving out different objects to see if the mouse would tidy them away too, which of course he did because he’s a perfect angel mouse from whom we could all learn a thing or two!
Holbrook has christened his little friend “The Welsh Tidy Mouse” telling the BBC that “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. 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.” OK, I’ll take twenty of them, please.
The best part of all this is that Holbrook’s Welsh Tidy Mouse isn’t the first! It turns out that there was another case back in 2019, where a cute little mouse friend kept “tidying” Steve McKears’ loose screws and other small metal items away into (unfortunately) a birdseed box. Well, he was trying! He had the spirit of helpfulness even if he didn’t have quite the right execution.
The fact that this has happened twice now, and been caught on camera, has implications. There might be legions of helpful little shed mice out there, just waiting to find their Cinderellas and keep your house/shed tidy in exchange for just a small handful of birdseed. This world is beautiful.
(via The Guardian, featured image: Disney)
