this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 days ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
153 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.

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[–] orenj@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

How useful would this have been back at the dawn of computation, I wonder?

[–] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

They didn’t have ultrasonic microphones at the dawn of computation

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Pigeon guided missile but instead of pigeon it's a parrot and sings relevant source code in hex and an interpeter assembles it.

(I hate the last 4 words that sentence I made.)