> So this looks really cute and all, but what she's doing is nesting, and once she fills that box with hard stuff, she adds tufts of her own fur and possibly other soft stuff like fiberglass insulation or the stuffing from car seats, then she has her babies in there, all the while peeing all over those parts and causing them to rust and smell like mouse piss for ever more.
I couldn't find it with a few Google searches, but I recall an interview with a Bansky-like character who 'created' this video and story as a sort of viral art project. Her interview also included a few other examples of strange phenomena she was behind. Since I'm unable to find evidence of said interview, however, I'm doubting myself...
I was going to flag this as not really being a HN story so much as something I'd expect to see go by on Facebook, but it did produce an interesting article link there.
I could see this going either way; a mouse could probably be trained to do this for a viral video. On the other hand, you can see animals get mental diseases known to occur in humans sometimes as well; an obsessive-compulsive mouse is also plausible to me.
(A disturbing number of "Look at my dog/cat/whatever doing this funny thing!" videos appears to my eyes to be the dog/cat/whatever having a seizure, for instance.)
Reminds me of a book I had as a kid about Anatole the Mouse .. he would sneak into a cheese factory at night and taste the samples and leave tasting notes, which benefited the cheese factory .. [Anatole (mouse) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatole_%28mouse%29)
In Finland, there's a lot of old folk tradition around "house elves" ("tonttu"), that sometimes perform useful tasks, sometimes not, but are best not angered in any case.
On the one hand, it's easy to see that mice rattling around could lead to such stories, but on the other hand, it's difficult to imagine people intimately familiar with mice being very mystified by them. However, if they do things like cleaning up in the night, I can imagine that might give rise to some myths!
Reminds me of a strange story of mysterious 'modern art' arrangements, of leaves and twigs, that appeared every morning on a workshop stoop (spoiler, it was a fieldmouse):
"Elena's Messages: From Her Big Sur Sanctuary"
https://www.amazon.com/Elenas-Messages-Her-Big-Sanctuary/dp/...
The mouse appears to be doing “cargo cult” type of behavior, placing junk in the bin and hoping peanuts will appear. Kind of like managers who hope that requesting documentation will help a better product appear on time. Fascinating.
tl;dr; the mouse is nesting