Actually, I found the answer; turns out someone down-voted it as not being a wild animal… I’ve voted it back into wild status myself and sent the downvoter a nice message asking if they wouldn’t mind switching their vote and explaining where the sighting actually happened; I think the confusion was that it’s in a wild wetland that’s across the road from a wildlife sanctuary, and maybe the downvoter hadn’t zoomed the map in far enough.
I actually found a forum post that, for whatever reason, hadn’t shown up when I typed in “casual observations” in the queries… naturally, it helped me solve the issue about a minute after I’d already submitted my question here! https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-is-this-observation-casual-needs-id-research-grade-official-topic/13186
Sorry for the false alarm there, folks; hopefully this helps someone down the road!