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IT STARTED innocently enough, with a friend telling me about the Peregrine Nest Cam at the University of California, Berkeley. High in the campus clock tower, under a webcam鈥檚 watchful eye, some biology researchers had arranged a box of gravel for two peregrine falcons and their three floofy, awkward babies. I couldn鈥檛 stop watching. I鈥檝e spent weeks following along as the chicks shed their down, fought for chunks of meat and screamed at the top of their lungs. Now, they are almost ready to fly and I feel a deep sense of accomplishment.

But why? I didn鈥檛 help these birds grow up, though I cheered for them remotely. Yet they are part of my life now. I have the falcon cam streaming to my desktop all the time, and I鈥檓 listening to two of the siblings squawk at each other as I write this. I can鈥檛 figure out what makes it so compelling. So I asked Emily Anthes, author of The Great Indoors, who spent years studying the science of indoor life. She told me that our brains respond to images of nature as if we were actually outdoors, so perhaps the falcons are giving me vicarious enjoyment of the open skies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_ghtsndkf4

Another possibility is that the falcon cam falls within a genre of online videos known as 鈥渙ddly satisfying鈥�. Commenters on Reddit came up with the phrase to describe short videos of everything from gears meshing and robot arms sorting batteries, to people painting in exact strokes on a fence or pressing dough into tidy circles. You can find millions of videos with the hashtag #oddlysatisfying on social media, and Google reports that various subtypes of the genre have shot up in popularity during quarantine.

An early video compilation in this genre, called simply 鈥淭he Most Satisfying Video in the World鈥�, has garnered more than 19 million views on YouTube since 2016 鈥� which is pretty impressive for a compilation video that features taffy stretching and marbles rolling down a chute. Its creators define 鈥渙ddly satisfying鈥� as 鈥渟omething that makes your skin tingle and for some unknown reason provides you with a sense of unbridled peace and happiness鈥�.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjeKw0B8PG8

Certainly that is the emotional state the falcons evoke, and not merely because they are cute. What the falcon cam shares with, say, a video of gears meshing is a sense of orderly progress.

The falcon cam is a way of experiencing the passage of time as a series of achievements: the samey days of quarantine blur into each other, but at least one thing is changing for the better. Those baby falcons are growing beautiful plumage, and by the time you read this they will be soaring in the hot California afternoons. #Oddlysatisfying videos give us the pleasure of task completion. That鈥檚 why it is so fun to watch fast-motion clips of people building or cooking something from start to finish.

Media researcher Stefan Werning writes that #oddlysatisfying videos arouse two seemingly opposed emotions: vigilance and amazement. Vigilance, Werning explains, creates a strong sense of interest or anticipation, while amazement gives us an intense distraction or surprise. This might explain why the falcon cam and other #oddlysatisfying videos are so popular during quarantine.

Doomscrolling through the news is making us hyper-vigilant, so we may be drawn to entertainment that incorporates that sensation of vigilance while also deflecting it with amazement. Put simply, escapism works best when it acknowledges the feelings we are trying to escape.

When time has slowed to a terrifying crawl, we want to see simple representations of change: birds growing up, gears meshing, automated threshers harvesting. We want to remember what it is like to go outside and accomplish mundane things. And so we keep clicking, hoping the next video will be more satisfying than the last.