It seems we share photos online everything these days, what we eat breakfast to the new shoes we have bought. Researchers have recently published a study what kinds of bird photos we like the social media site Instagram. This is a photo and video-sharing social networking service which uploaded images are viewable just 24 hours. The researchers are the University of Konstanz in Germany. They looked the question: "What makes a great bird photo?" They tried to find the most 'instagrammable' bird. They discovered that the frogmouth is our favourite. This is a nocturnal bird that is found India, across Southeast Asia to Australia.
The researchers analysed nearly 30,000 bird photos nine popular bird photography Instagram accounts. They created a special computer algorithm to find which photos attracted the most "likes" the photo-sharing platform. Ornithologist Tim Snyder suggested the frogmouth was the most liked bird because its large eyes and wide beak. He said that while most birds' eyes are positioned the sides their head, the frogmouth's eyes are more the centre its face, which makes the bird appear more "humanlike". Wildlife photographer Graeme Purdy told the BBC: "Anything cute and cuddly evokes something human nature - and particularly anything big eyes."
