Late one Friday night, clients of Mayday Pest Solutions, Inc. heard a strange knocking. Having relied on Mayday for three years to route brown, recluse spiders from their garage and spray their property for rodents, they didn’t hesitate to call, despite the fact that it was 10 p.m. A technician uniformed in a white polo arrived first thing the next morning and followed the noise to discover a bewildered possum hiding inside the garage. Instead of shrugging his shoulders and referring the couple to animal control or the local pied piper, he trapped the visitor, bid adieu to the unwitting hosts, and left to re-release it into the wild.

That kind of aplomb is the result of more than a decade of experience in pest control. The family at Mayday opened its business in 1998, and since then, the business and its technicians have demonstrated a rare dedication and lack of squeamishness if the job extends beyond normal requirements. Mayday’s primary targets are winged, stinging insects such as hornets and wasps, as well as ants, small rodents, fleas, and ticks, which technicians will valiantly pursue to the edge of any property line or backyard moat.