Mouse filmed tidying man's shed every night | Hacker News Reader

Mouse filmed tidying man's shed every night

theguardian.com

154 pointsaustinallegro45 comments

> It is not the first time he has come across an organised rodent. When living in Bristol in 2019, his friend reached out for help fixing up a night camera when another mouse was keeping their shed in order.

I hate being one of those people who treats everything with suspicion, but he previously helped a friend who was also using a night vision camera to record a "tidying up" mouse?

The behavior is common, the only thing suspicious is calling it “tidying up” rather than nest building or whatever.

Often it is the same thing.

It would be a very sisyphean way to build a nest given the objects kept moving. Seems more like play behavior (or mouse OCD)

I was wondering where that quote came from as it’s not on the submitted Guardian article. I found it at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-67902966

I wouldn’t be overly suspicious. A wildlife enthusiast would be the in the right social circles if someone needed a night camera. Also, the mouse’s behaviour doesn’t seem to be too uncommon – just not well documented and/or recorded.

When my partner and I returned home after a 1 month trip, we discovered caches of 1cm food pellets (dog food?) in various places in our house: in one boot, in the pocket of one backpack, under our bedroom pillow, nestled between two couch cushions. The neatness made it seem mysterious: Did I forget I had stowed dog food in my backpack, and while packing let the backpack drip on our bed and couch? The boot is what gave it away as mousework.

did you break one up to check they weren't cocoons

they were kind of sponge-like with internal cavities, so it was clear they were not cocoons

That was likely excrement.

The parents used to have a very meticulous rat living in their compost bin. It would carefully anrrange all the bits of food inside, chucking out the things it didn’t like. On particularly cold nights it would stuff used teabags into the gaps around the lid to block up the draughts.

I was sure this was going to be an article about a mouse making a short film about a guy cleaning his shed.

I'm sorry, this time it was the other way around. If you want to talk about this, please reach out. We're never far. Squeak.

Newspaper headline rules occasionally lead to syntatically ambiguous sentences [1], sometimes funny ones. In this case, the headline is a garden-path sentence [2]. Cutting out "to be" words (Mouse was filmed -> Mouse filmed) in headlines is called zero copula [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity#In_headlin...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula#In_English

I'm heading to the pet store now to buy 20 mice. I'll let them out and every morning I want that kitchen looking spotless.

Every crumb will be gone, only to be replaced by a small turd.

My cat seems to be doing the exact opposite: removing random objects from desks and shelves, and leaving them in random unreachable corners.

What makes a corner unreachable?

Larger objects in said corners that get in the way.

The non-euclidean nature of the cats placement of things

Also typical cat behavior. It's where they go after they're bored of simply knocking things off tables.

Maybe the cat is waiting for a mouse to come along and try to gather the objects?

Sounds like a Womble infestation. If you check behind the shed you'll find Bernard Cribbins doing all the voices :P

It’s Hunca Munca! Incidentally that’s what we named our Roomba.

Impressive. Maybe I can get it to train my kids :)

Probably yet another mouse experiment that doesn’t transfer to humans.

Lol. Oblig IN MICE.

My cat organized her collection of mice corpses in a very properly aligned cemetery behind the stairs in our cellar. About 15 when we found it

Imagine how many times this happened way back when. You had no real way to prove it easily.

I'd say that was the culprit of many people blaming gremlins gnomes and the like.

I'd love to know wtf it did with that long, straw-like tube around the 1-minute mark... "I got big plans, George"

I read a story about this but it was elves working for a shoemaker during the night instead

♬ ♬ "Now we are jaunty gentlemen, Why should we ever work again?"

Wonderful. I need 20 of them just for myself.

Looks to be a serial mouse.

I know this is standard headline grammar, but my god it was very hard to not read this as the mouse doing the filming every night. Specifically, filming a shed that belongs to a tidying man.

It's not standard headline grammar by definition. They do leave out function words (A mouse was), but in the same space, you could write: "Mouse tidying a man's shed every night secretly filmed." In which case "secretly" stands out as superfluous, because nobody expects you to inform the mouse beforehand.

Non-click bait heading: Mouse builds nests out of messy shed’s contents.

Yea seriously. Stuffing random junk in a random box. That is what they do....

This is clickbait it's not tidying, it's just storing away items. Squirrels that cache things aren't tidying.

Man secretly filmed tidying bank’s vault every night.

Also a simple misunderstanding about nest building strategies.

That's as maybe, but it's doing a better job than my 17 year old son.

An alternative take is that it’s just a fun title for a cute thing that happened in someone’s shed.

Fun is illegal on HN unless it involves programming

Obviously. But relax. It is nice to think about something fun for a change.

If that squirrel is caching everything from an area in the same spot, then yes it is.

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