Raccoon set off a motion sensor at 2am, the panel said 'BURGLARY' and the homeowner answered in full tactical gear

Last week I had a service call out in Maplewood for a false alarm that kept tripping every night around 2:15am. The homeowner was this retired guy named Bob who clearly took his home security very seriously. I get there at 8am, he's already in a plate carrier with a flashlight mounted on it, coffee in hand. He walks me to the back patio sensor and says "it's either a ghost or someone testing me." So I pop the cover off the motion sensor and there's a damn raccoon print right on the lens, like a raccoon paw smudge from where he reached up and touched it. Turns out a momma raccoon had been climbing the trellis right next to the sensor every night to get to a bird feeder he had hung too close. I moved the sensor up 14 inches and angled it down a bit, told him to move the feeder 6 feet away. He tipped me $40 and asked if I wanted to see his AR setup. I declined, but I did ask if he'd had any other wildlife triggers before. He said a squirrel set off the driveway beam once and he almost called the cops on himself. Has anyone else had animals cause false alarms that turned into a whole thing? I swear I've seen everything from cats to possums but that raccoon print on the lens was a first for me.

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1 Comment

seanlee11d ago

Thirty dollars says that raccoon knew exactly what it was doing and Bob's setup is the reason it kept coming back. A bird feeder that close to a motion sensor is basically a drive-thru for smart wildlife, and the raccoon probably learned the alarm means a human will come out and scare it off, so it treats the whole thing like a game. You did Bob a favor by fixing the sensor, but honestly he got a better story and a test run of his gear than most alarm customers ever get, so maybe the raccoon was the real hero here.