Dear Readers, a lot of you will have been fascinated, as I was, by the film of a wood mouse ‘tidying up’ the shed of wildlife photographer Rodney Holbrook, who lives in Powys, Wales. He noticed that items that he’d left on his workbench were being tidied away overnight, and so he set up a night vision camera (as you do). The film of what was happening has gone viral, and hopefully you’ll be able to watch it here.

What is really going on here though? There are a number of clues. Holbrook mentions that the mouse was also stashing birdseed in his work shoes which he also left in the shed, so what the mouse could be doing is preparing to have hibernate, or to have babies – s/he appears to be hiding food away for a rainy day, and the ‘tidying up’ could well be an attempt to nest. Anyone who has kept small rodents as pets will know that they will put all sorts of things into their nests that don’t appear to be very comfortable. The urge to make a safe place seems to be compulsive in some animals, and they’ll use whatever they can find in order to add to it.

Exhibit Two.

This is the magpie nest/squirrel drey in my whitebeam tree. After a few days of high winds the nest is rather less substantial than it used to be, but these pieces of plastic were originally tightly tucked into the structure. They look to me like the stuff that’s used to wrap building materials, and there’s been plenty of construction going on in the County Roads here in East Finchley, as there usually is. Either the magpies who nested in the spring, or the squirrels who took over the nest later in the year, decided that this material was too good to waste, and used it to make their nest/drey.

This shows how adaptable animals are, but also makes me sad. Maybe the plastic provides a degree of waterproofing, but it might also wrap around somebody’s neck, or get eaten. Just as the mouse appears to be trying to make a cache or a nest out of bottle tops and plastic lids, so the animals in my garden are using what they find around them to make themselves safe and comfortable. Their survival depends on it, and while Tidy Mouse might be cute, it shows how instinct can encourage animals to use their time (so short in the case of a wood mouse, which lives a couple of years at best) to do things that might not be in their best interests.

Still, at least Tidy Mouse has access to probably plentiful supplies of bird seed, and a warmish, dry place to live, and maybe there are other interpretations for their behaviour. Let me know what you think, Readers! And for those of you who have long memories, here is another story of a mouse in a shed, this time one that found his or her way into the seed bin for the birds. It was written a few months before my mother died, and it’s painful to read how full of hope for her recovery I was. Still, it’s hope that often gets us through, so let’s not knock it…