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The Sunrise

Tawny Frogmouth

Instagram's Favorite Broken Branch

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Photo: Matt from Melbourne / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Instagram's Favorite Broken Branch

You have almost certainly walked right past one without knowing it. By day, the Tawny Frogmouth sits dead still on a branch, head tipped up and eyes shut to slits, and turns itself into a snapped-off length of grey deadwood. Then a pair of German researchers went hunting for the most beautiful bird on the internet and landed on this one. The bird that spends its life pretending to be firewood is, by one measure, the most photogenic bird alive.

Not an Owl, No Matter What It Looks Like

Tawny Frogmouth camouflaged against tree bark, blending in like a broken branch
Photo: Richard N Horne / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

Its scientific name is Podargus strigoides, and the second half is a quiet joke at the bird’s expense. Strigoides means “owl-like,” from the Latin strix for owl. The first half, Podargus, comes from a Greek word for “gouty,” a nod to those short, weak feet. So the formal name reads as something close to “the gouty thing that resembles an owl.” It resembles one, but it is not one. Owls hunt with powerful talons; the frogmouth has feeble feet and snatches moths and beetles, plus the occasional mouse, in that wide, frog-like mouth it is named for. Its eyes sit toward the sides of its head, not forward like an owl’s. And rather than tucking into dense foliage, it hides in the open, freezing into its broken-branch pose and trusting that you will never look twice. A parent will even signal its chicks to hold still and stay silent rather than break the spell.

The Internet’s Most Surprising Heartthrob

In 2021, two German researchers, Katja Thömmes and Gregor Hayn-Leichsenring, who study why people find images beautiful, pulled more than 27,000 bird photos from nine popular Instagram accounts and scored each one by how many likes it earned against what that account usually pulled in. Across 116 bird families, the winner was not a parrot or a bird of paradise. It was the Tawny Frogmouth. They called it “the surprising winner,” and pointed out that this is the very same bird once labelled “the world’s most unfortunate-looking bird.” Thömmes put the appeal down to shock: “The frogmouth brings that factor of surprise as it just does not look like any other bird, with its almost anthropomorphic, facial features.” A grumpy face, it turns out, photographs beautifully.

What You’d Actually Hear

The voice does not match the celebrity. If you wake up somewhere in Australia, the sound drifting through the dark is a low, soft “oom-oom-oom,” a repeated pulse so deep and even it barely registers as a bird at all. For generations, listeners confused it with the Southern Boobook, the small owl whose call is its own name spoken aloud, a two-note “mo-poke” that carries through the same gum trees after dark. Two very different birds, one easy mix-up, both working the same shift.

There is something fitting about a creature that wins at both ends of the day. It spends the daylight hours insisting it is a piece of wood, then ends up the most-liked face in the feed. Hide well enough, it seems, and the world eventually comes looking for you.

Sources:

AustraliaTawny Frogmouth

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