A farmer got more than he bargained for after going to check on the contents of a mousetrap he'd set up to deal with a rodent problem.

Luke, who runs a farm in Kentucky with his wife, Lindsey, took to Reddit, posting under the handle u/k0rny. He revealed the "surprising sight" that greeted him when he went to check on the trap.

As the temperatures drop, it's common for homeowners to find themselves welcoming some uninvited furry guests. Pest control company Orkin says every fall an estimated 21 million homes across the U.S. will be invaded by mice or other rodents.

"They typically enter homes between October and February looking for food, water and shelter from the cold," Orkin told Fox Weather.

Luke, who asked that his surname not be used, told Newsweek the couple's mouse "problem" started "sometime in the last month or two."

"We live on a small farm, and the mice have found their way into the feed room in our barn," he said. "We started noticing mouse droppings in the feed room, behind some storage containers and on some shelving."

The presence of mice in this area of the farm significantly concerned Luke as a farmer.

"Mice can cause major destruction over time," he said. "They can also cause harm and spread disease not only to humans but animals too, and we have a dozen other animals on our farm."

Those concerns are backed up by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which warns that "certain diseases can spread from rodents to people through direct contact with infected rodents."

"This can be through breathing in contaminated air, touching contaminated materials and then touching eyes, nose, or mouth," the CDC said. "They can also spread by being bitten or scratched by an infected rodent, or eating food contaminated by an infected rodent."

The key to controlling any rodent problem is to stop it before the animals establish themselves in a home or a building such as a barn. That's what made Luke's discovery arguably the best possible thing he could have found waiting for him in the trap that day.

Luke had set up a humane mousetrap and planned to release his unwanted guest back into the wild. However, when he went to check on the trap a day after putting it down, he was surprised to discover that not only had he caught the mouse but she was not alone.

As a picture posted to Reddit under the u/k0rny handle shows, the mouse had given birth while stuck inside the trap and could be seen nursing her new litter of pink baby mice.

"The mouse was caught a couple hours or so before I made the post," Luke said. "They were immediately taken to a field a couple miles away and released."

Though that particular mouse and her litter have now been relocated, it sounds as if Luke's rodent problem is something of an ongoing problem. "She was the third mouse we caught this week if you don't count the babies," he said.

Luke said he shared the picture of what greeted him to give others a look at what was a "very rare occurrence." He also takes pride in using humane traps rather than one that might have resulted in the deaths of the mouse and her babies.

"I would rather give them a fighting chance in nature, as far away from other humans as possible, rather than be the direct cause of their demise," he said.

Ultimately, this kind of unusual capture was good news in his ongoing efforts to deal with his farm's mouse problem.

"I was glad we were able to capture the mother mouse before the baby mice were born nearby, which only would have made our infestation worse," Luke said.