If you had to pick the most “instagrammable bird” in the world, you probably wouldn’t go for the frogmouth (
Podargus strigoides) a nocturnal bird found in Australia and Southeast Asia that is often mistaken for an owl.
But science says otherwise. A study analyzed almost 27,000 photos of birds across Instagram accounts with a combined following of 3.5 million users and found the unassuming frogmouth took the top spot in the ranking.
The Frogmouth. Image credit: Flickr / Rae Allen
“It just does not look like any other bird, with its almost anthropomorphic facial features,” lead researcher Katja Thommes, a psychologist from the University of Konstanz in Germany, told BBC. “And frogmouths are quite rare. Even in our 20,000-image database, it featured only 65 times.”