“It’s CSI for field mice,” David Curtis 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.

The Redding Pilot