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(Video Credit: Raptor Resource Project, UStream)

Over the past few months, the Raptor Resource Project has been hosting this live "nest cam" feed of a pair of eagles in Decorah, IA.  As of last week, the pair became the proud parents of three babies, and the drama of their incubating and hatching eggs has become a bit of an internet sensation.  The project is part of a conservation effort directed toward monitoring and understanding the nesting habits of avian raptors (eagles, falcons, owls, etc.), maintaining nesting sites, and educating the public.

As you can imagine, the behavior of the human beings observing the birds on the interenet is, in many ways, almost as interesting as the behavior of the birds themselves.  The Ustream site features a social media feed, and certain conventions have sprung up among people who discuss the birds on Facebook and Twitter.  Inevitably, viewers refer to the male and female eagle as "Dad" and "Mom," and as Twisty Faster of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy has noted, viewers seem to be pretty quick to ascribe gendered behavior to them:

It is remarkable that human people can look at eagles — creatures that inhabit Volkswagen-sized piles of twigs 80′ up in trees, that lay eggs, that have no hair and no boobs, that eat raw squirrels, that can fly, for crying out loud, and that in pretty much every other respect that is germane to discourse on human social structure are the very antithesis of H. sapiens — and see themselves. And by “themselves” I mean the patriarchal paradigm. In a nest of eagles.

Twisty notes that several personal acquaintances who are obsessed with the feed sometimes critique the eagles' parenting skills, as if they were watching episodes of "Kate Plus 8" (sans Jon) or "Super Nanny" rather than the behavior of creatures who are different from us in almost every perceivable way.

Then again, info-tainment television shows about animals have, in a very real way, primed us to think about animal behavior and social organization in the terms in which we understand our own.  The highly popular Animal Planet show Meerkat Manor is a prime example:

So my question is, does this help or hurt?  Do visual representations of animals that allow us anthropomorphize them encourage us to support conservation or do they simply lead to misunderstanding? Is our tendency to anthropomorphize inevitable or could these representations discourage it in some way?