Bald eagle nesting pairs in the US

Between 2007 and 2021, bald eagle nesting pairs in the United States and the volume of video uploaded to YouTube per minute grew together with a correlation of 0.97, suggesting that America's national bird and America's national time-sink are somehow cosmically aligned. Eagles, it turns out, have been quietly nesting at the same rate humans have been uploading dashcam compilations. Whether the eagles are aware of this is unknown, but they have the eyesight for it.

Bald eagle populations recovered dramatically after the DDT ban of 1972 and ESA protections; by 2007 there were roughly 10,000 nesting pairs, growing to over 30,000 by the late 2010s. YouTube upload rates grew from about 6 hours per minute in 2007 to over 500 hours per minute by the early 2020s. Both are success stories of a kind — one of environmental restoration, one of technological platform adoption — each growing on its own exponential curve during the same period. The timescales and mechanisms are entirely unrelated.

Recovery and growth both produce upward curves, and upward curves correlate with each other whether or not they share a planet, let alone a cause. The eagle does not know about YouTube; YouTube does not know about the eagle; the correlation knows about both.