In the spring of 2012, a pair of bald eagles took up residence for a few months in the upper reaches of a loblolly pine just inside the main entrance to Berry College. They returned to the nest that fall and, to the delight of the humans down below, could be seen the following spring raising two eaglets. The little ones flew away in April, and the parents left soon after.
Creatures of all kinds are a fixture at Berry College. The 27,000-acre campus at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains, in northwest Georgia, includes a wildlife refuge and wildlife management area. Animal science is one of its most popular majors. So Berry officials decided to be ready if the raptors came back the next fall. Why not install a camera, they thought, that would show what happens inside the nest?
Sony donated a camera. Georgia Power sent workers and a bucket truck to install it. Up went the eagle cam, affixed to the boughs of the tree 100 feet up, just above the giant nest of twigs and branches.
In September 2013, the eagles came back to their old nest and settled in again. With its protagonists in place, the eagle cam began streaming live on the college’s website. By the end of the year, even though the nesting eagles hadn’t offered much in the way of action, interest was brewing: Unique views on the nest cam had topped 413,000.
Finally, in January, the birds provided a story. The female laid two eggs, and suddenly the eagle cam was documenting two doting parents preparing to raise their young in an unpredictable world of snowstorms, high winds, and predators. The server crashed from the rush of attention. Campus officials knew they had a hit on their hands.
By early February, the cam hit one million views; a week or so later, web traffic spiked still higher after fans—and local newscasters—circulated a video clip of the female fending off a nighttime attack by a great horned owl. So much drama, and the eggs hadn’t even hatched yet.
“I don’t know if this is what you’d call viral,” Stephen R. Briggs, Berry’s president, recalls thinking, “but how do we use this opportunity?”
For a college of just 2,100 students, sudden fame calls for some adjustments.
Staff members have been working overtime to field an avalanche of calls and emails. Social media need constant tending. The website required a new server to accommodate the deluge.
And now campus officials have had to include raptor chit-chat on their list of talking points. Mr. Briggs was at a foundation meeting in New York when employees there asked about the eagles. In San Antonio for a conference, a faculty member found herself fielding questions about the birds while riding in an elevator.
Gary Waters, vice president for enrollment, has observed the eagle frenzy with amusement. “What I’ve come to learn,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “is that there are surprisingly large numbers of people who are extremely passionate about eagles.”
Viewers in Finland, Israel, and Japan have checked in. So has a fan in Australia, who says she wakes up in the middle of the night so she can watch the eagles in daylight. A woman in Idaho reported that her elderly mother, not a fan of the Internet, now fires up an iPad every day just so she can tune in.
Days of labor by a public-relations firm couldn’t top this, Mr. Briggs says. “I’m not smart enough to have thought this one up,” he says. “For us it’s a matter of stewardship now, to make the most of the moment and tell our story.”
Among other things, that meant doing some quick work to overhaul the eagle cam’s web page to introduce visitors to “beautiful Berry.” As just one visible piece of a campus that views itself as a big environmental lab, the eagles give Mr. Briggs an opening to talk about the college’s rare stands of longleaf pine trees and American chestnuts, its Jersey cows, and the nonvenomous indigo snakes and gopher tortoises that roam the area.
Still, he doesn’t keep the cam open all day in his office. “I have other work to do,” he says. “My wife lets me know when I need to check something.”
In late February, the college’s trustees were on campus for a meeting, in a room where the eagle cam was streaming on two screens. Just a few minutes after they shut the door in executive session, the room erupted in cheers. The first egg had hatched.
Covered in fuzzy gray down, the tiny eaglet captivated its global audience. Sleeping. Eating bites of fish or coot. Learning how to navigate the nest on its yellow talons, like a puppy tripping over its too-large paws. Viewers couldn’t look away.
In early March, the college organized a live web chat with Reneé E. Carleton, a veterinarian and an associate professor of biology at Berry, who has served as the unofficial eagle spokeswoman. Questions poured in: What about that second egg, unhatched? (It wasn’t viable.) Why did the male eagle bury it? (He was just tidying up.) Why is the nest so close to the parking lot? (“That’s a great question. I would love to ask them that.”)
A bald eagle reaches nearly full size in about four months, growing from a tiny puff of a bird to a 14-pound bruiser. It won’t have the signature white head until it is several years old. But by early spring, viewers could see that dark-brown feathers had replaced the gray down, and the young performer had begun testing its wings. Open, closed. Open, closed.
Mainly it lazed around under its mother’s watch—and the distant gaze of many more: 9.5 million video views by early April.
“Watching the Berry College Eagles is like watching Downton Abbey,” one fan wrote on the birds’ Facebook page, which now has more than 50,000 likes. “Only here for a short time, you plan your day/week around it, gets you hooked and then you have to wait anxiously a whole year for the return.”
The fascination has bordered on the obsessive. Fans express worry when the eaglet trembles, or when it perches close to the edge of the nest. They know, from close observation of the young bird’s body language, when it is about to release a “poop shoot.” Some called the college during a snowstorm, urging officials to leave food and water at the base of the tree. They wonder whether the remains of half-eaten prey will attract maggots. (If that happens, Dr. Carleton assures them, it’s just another source of protein.)
“Honestly, I don’t watch it 24 hours,” she says in an interview, noting that it’s bluebird season, and that she’s had her hands full prepping for Berry’s new bluebird cam. “I’m a little bit eagled out.”
Mr. Waters, the vice president, says he appreciates the exposure the nesting pair has brought to the college. But he’s a numbers guy, so he looks for some kind of correlation between hits on the eagle cam and hits on the admissions page. As far as he can tell, there isn’t one.
While eagle madness happened too late in the admissions season for Berry to fully capitalize on it, Mr. Waters says he takes the long view. Educators in elementary, middle, and high-school classrooms all across the country have written to the college to say that are streaming the eagle cam in their classrooms.
“These are the future college applicants,” he says. “Berry has been implanted in their minds associated with something pretty cool. I can’t help but think that we will definitely benefit from this in the future.”
Still, he notes with just a touch of envy that Mercer University, about two and a half hours down I-75, recently had its own moment in the sun. Fixing a camera on some eagles can do a lot to put a college’s name out there, he notes. But so does a victory over Duke University in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
