as I type this, I am, according to the counter at the bottom of the screen, one of 556,749 global Internet users watching a family of great horned owls sit in a tree in Texas. All the owls are asleep.

In any case, the bald eagle incident in Minnesota started like this: One Thursday night in early May, people watching the “EagleCam” run by the Nongame Wildlife Program of the state’s Department of Natural Resources noticed that one of the three eagle chicks in the nest was immobile. It appeared to be suffering. Bald eagle chicks are endearing, but not, in any traditional sense, cute: Their unwieldy, disproportionate wings and legs wind up contorting into all kinds of crazy tangles when they lie around the nest. (Go online and look for yourself, but to my eye, they look like coils of uncooked sausage coated in dryer lint.) The EagleCam audience had grown intensely attached to these young birds, though; after all, many had been following them since their eggs were laid back in February. The Nongame Wildlife Program makes a point of not naming the birds. But on Facebook, fans had taken to calling the chicks “Snap,” “Crackle” and “Pop.” Snap was the one having trouble. The little bird couldn’t get up to eat. Clearly, it wouldn’t survive much longer.

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THE public outcry, Ms. Naumann later told me, was “getting more hostile as the day went on.” It became hard to ignore. At one point that Friday afternoon, she found herself on the phone with a woman who simply couldn’t accept the agency’s refusal to help Snap. “She was crying and crying and could not be consoled,” Ms. Naumann said

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The emails kept coming that day. They were emphatic. Some were written in all caps. The Nongame Wildlife Program doesn’t disclose the eagle nest’s location, but a few people threatened to find it and rescue Snap themselves. Finally, late in the afternoon, Ms. Naumann got a call from the governor’s office; they were getting pummeled with phone calls, too, and wanted to know how the Nongame Wildlife Program intended to play this...