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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[–] socsa@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes you could likely design an optimized modulation scheme to do this, likely some kind of bird specific frequency shift keying. You can also do any kind of quadrature modulation in the audio spectrum (original dialup used acoustic modems).

This person just didn't do that in this case. It's still a very cool experiment by YouTube maker standards though.

[–] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago

My point is that it doesn’t have to be optimal to be considered digital. Which in the general case means basically any communication channel can be digital.

If the argument is that they didn’t correctly calculate the bandwidth, then sure.