Sherlock Holmes wields a large magnifying glass as he bends to examine obscure footprints in the carpet. David Curtis of Lonetown Road follows the same tradition, only he is holding a black light and following the tiny glowing footprints of maraudering field mice.
“It’s CSI for field mice,” he said recently of his new mouse tracking system, RodoTrak. It offers what he calls a baited box with a car-wash effect dousing mice with florescent powder.
He and a neighbor, Henry Emanuel of Lonetown Road, have a new company to market and make the device.Mr. Curtis is a second generation exterminator — Avon Pest Control in Stamford was started by his father in the sixties. “I cover all of Fairfield and Weschester counties. I have eight guys out doing general pest control services... Our job is to get it out or keep it out,” he said.
As the warm temperatures dip and frost rises, a lot of mice and other small creatures are headed indoors where everything is warm.
“We get the calls, rodents in house, droppings in the drawers, noises in the walls. We get a lot of noises in the wall... That’s kind of how this started,” he said.
Mr. Emanuel asked if there was a way to keep the mice out rather than killing them inside his house. “He said that maybe we could track them and see how they are getting in. Originally, we just looked for holes and plugged them,” Mr. Curtis said.
Mr. Emanuel is in the carpet business and uses fluorescent material for color enhancement. “I have a fluorescent material — maybe we can see how they are coming in,” he told Mr. Curtis. “His question was how we could get it on the mice. I had to build some kind of encapsulating trap so the rodents would actually treat themselves,” he said.
He experimented with different forms of the fluorescent, which comes in various liquids and powder forms, and with different container shapes and types of fibers for the mechanism. “I had to make a lot of changes to make it work,” Mr. Curtis said
The result is patent pending — a tunnel-like box is baited and filled with synthetic fibers bearing the fluorescent material.
“It coats their fur as well as their feet. Once they leave, we can track where they are getting in and out. The trails tell you everything you want to know about how these mice are using the structure...,” he said. The trails are revealed using a hand-held black light.
According to the company’s press release, RodoTrak uses non-poisonous baited “rodent detection stations” loaded with non-toxic fluorescent powder.
The fibrous material contains enough powder to cover approximately 15 linear feet outside and even more inside. Once they leave the detection and tracking station, the rodents create a trail of powder left as footprints where they walk or “body” prints where they rub against an entry (or exit) point The stations are set up in a maze-like pattern to locate and pinpoint rodent activity.
“In one case, a homeowner was absolutely convinced that mice were entering around a door. The door had been tightened several times and it moldings replaced, all to no avail. We set up three RodoTrak stations and tracked their path to a hole beneath the building’s siding, and did it within 24 hours!” Mr. Curtis said.
One local man, Gino Marsili of the Village Chef, has used the system in his residence and is very pleased with it. “In my house we had the classic signs of mice... you could hear them or see the droppings.” Mr. Marsili is something of a do-it-yourselfer.
“You have a black light and you start at the RodoTrak and you can follow their foot prints in the florescent dust,” he said. “In one situation at my house, there was a hole the size of a quarter about five feet off the ground. They were climbing all the way up there to that hole. I didn’t know I had a hole in my foundation but you can see their footprints,” he said.
His foundation is old stone, and he was able to fill the places where the old cement was crumbed away.
“I am 100% satisfied” Mr. Marsili said.
For more information, visit the company’s Web site at http://www.rodotrak.com.
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