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