MICE sowed the seeds of a potential motoring disaster in caravan fan Alan Franklin's H-reg Nissan Primera.

Former Rover worker Alan, 65, of Alice Smith Square, Littlemore, had noticed a drop in pulling power in his car, coupled to an increase in fuel bills every time he pulled up at the pumps.

He was puzzled about the drop in performance so decided to give his Primera the once-over, taking out the spark plugs for cleaning.

Alan then took the cover off the air filter - and had a huge shock when he had a close look inside.

For there he discovered thousands of sunflower seeds!

And that's when a few mysteries in the garage of his home began to make sense.

Alan recalls: "We feed the birds regularly and left a packet of sunflower seeds in the garage. I noticed that something was having a go at it, and thought it could be mice.

"So I put some traps down and caught five mice. I never thought any more about it until the car started to lose power.

"We noticed it particularly while towing our caravan and that's why I decided to have a look at the engine. You can imagine our surprise when he saw all the sunflower seeds in the air filter.

"The mice must have been getting up through an air intake and leaving them there for a winter feast. There were enough seeds to fill two bird-feeder tubes. After we cleaned out all the seeds, the engine's fine now and its performance is back to normal.

"But my wife Kath was so amazed, we decided to take pictures of the seeds. We've never seen anything like it."

Do you have any funny stories about animals or pets and your set of wheels. If so, contact Roy Cooper, Wheels, Oxford Mail, Newspaper House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 OEJ.

Story date: Wednesday 17 November

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.