How Wildlife Alert works
Every alert travels through the same four stages, in order — from the first hint of movement on your Ring camera to a notification that names the animal at your door. Here is what happens at each step.
The four detection stages
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Motion detection
It starts with your Ring camera. When the camera detects motion in its field of view, it captures a snapshot of the scene and hands it to Wildlife Alert to review. Nothing is analyzed until there is motion, so quiet moments cost you nothing.
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Animal screening
A fast, low-cost first-pass AI model looks at the frames and asks one simple question: is there an animal here at all? People, passing cars, swaying branches, and shifting shadows are filtered out at this step. Only events that look like an animal go on to the detailed analysis, which keeps the system quick and inexpensive. At night, when small or distant animals are hardest to see, the screen is deliberately not trusted to reject an event — so a nocturnal visitor is never dismissed on a cheap first look.
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AI species identification
When the first pass flags a likely animal, a more capable AI model watches the event's video clip to identify the specific species — a coyote, a bear, a bobcat, a raccoon, a deer, or your own dog. Watching the clip rather than a single still matters: how an animal moves separates a coyote from a loose dog, and a dog walking alongside a person is obviously a pet. The model also gets non-visual context — your camera's town, the local time, and the season — so an animal that does not live in your area is not a plausible answer.
Before an alert goes out, a separate grounding check has to locate the claimed animal in the frame. If it cannot, the detection is dropped. That independent second opinion is what stops an empty, floodlit patio from being reported as a cat.
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Alert delivery
Finally, if the identified species matches the animals you have asked to hear about, Wildlife Alert sends an instant push notification and email. You see what was spotted, when, and on which camera — without wading through every routine motion event. Dangerous species such as coyote, bear, mountain lion, and bobcat are flagged as critical, and you can set your account to a higher sensitivity so a named dangerous animal is never filtered out.
The flow at a glance
The same four-stage sequence, start to finish: motion detection feeds animal screening, which feeds AI species identification, which feeds alert delivery.
- Stage 1 Motion detection
- Stage 2 Animal screening
- Stage 3 AI species identification
- Stage 4 Alert delivery