this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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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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[–] ISOmorph@feddit.org 169 points 1 week ago (17 children)

In before EU genocides all starlings because you can't put backdoors in them to scan for CSAM.

[–] PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 85 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Well, technically it has a built in backdoor...

[–] hoch@lemmy.world 82 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Do not what the bird?

Complement?

Conflagrate?

Carry in a cute baby stroller?

[–] ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 22 points 1 week ago

More of a front and back door, if my understanding of a cloaca is correct

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[–] khannie@lemmy.world 70 points 1 week ago (5 children)

2MB/s / 16Mbps is enough for 4K HEVC video and audio. In theory you could encode a full movie with enough starlings.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 50 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And they say physical media is dead!

[–] Tikiporch@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The average lifespan of a starling is usually between two and five years.

[–] Cort@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

This just gave me an idea for a new movie rental service. You'll never own anything. If we can get homing pigeons to learn movies, we could cut delivery costs

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

They tried to make this a thing once :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-D

If Disney did this, they'd probably just poison the birds so they die faster.

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[–] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 32 points 1 week ago

A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we're gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.

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[–] RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 61 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Reducing Benn Jordan down to just “enthusiast” is wild.

[–] Psaldorn@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago

Musician/Wizard/Activist

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[–] Vespair@lemmy.zip 58 points 1 week ago

We're finally getting tweets back

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 46 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Quick, someone teach it the soundtrack to Doom

[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Can you run Doom on it tho?

[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" just got a whole lot worse.

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[–] YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Hear me out! Bird factor authentication!

Please honk your seagull to unlock your ed25519-sk ssh key

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[–] muzzle@lemmy.zip 38 points 1 week ago

This is a whole new twist over RFC 1149: IP over Avian Carriers

[–] rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 36 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Some people will use anything but cloud storage

[–] thedruid@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago

But. I mean. The data COULD reach the clouds I mean... Bird....

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 week ago

Well of course NSA's spy device can store information. We've known this for decades

[–] Gerudo@lemmy.zip 24 points 1 week ago (3 children)
[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago

This only seems to support the theory

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[–] ScrotusMaximus@lemmy.zip 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

good to see there are new developments in the IP Over Avian Carrier space

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[–] xc2215x@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Data on a bird ? This will convince people about birds being drones more now.

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[–] gozz@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not to be a wet blanket, but every time this comes up I get annoyed by some factual inaccuracies in the articles about this. It is not digital! He drew an image on a computer, but converted it to an analogue spectrogram to store on the bird. That's neat as hell, but it's not digital. The image that he got back was slightly corrupted.

Now I would be fascinated to see a follow-up seeing if you can actually modulate a digital signal and have is survive a round trip through the bird bit-for-bit accurate. I suspect in reality it would be much lower data rate, but definitely not nothing!

[–] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

By your definition nothing can be digital since the world is analog. Even the bits in your CPU are voltages in transistors. As such, every real life signal can be distorted.

[–] Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 week ago (8 children)

The point with digital transfers is that you round it back to either 0 or 1, hoping that no bits are distorted enough to have any loss at all.

[–] gozz@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (9 children)

Exactly. Digital logic, when implemented in analogue, generally have to have forbidden zones where a signal in that range is considerer invalid. Regardless of implementation, digital is about the discretized logic of the system. That is explicitly the whole point of digital: Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.

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[–] abruptly8951@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Hmm, not so sure. He produced a digital signal, who's spectrogram happened to be an image, and then played that digital signal to a bird. Dunno if a analogue spectrogram really even makes sense as a concept. The only analogue part of the chain would be the birds vocalisations, right?

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[–] salty_chief@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Birds are the OG text device. Tie a little note and send them on their way.

One famous example is Cher Ami, a pigeon who delivered a message that saved a group of surrounded American soldiers during WW1.

Edit: WW1 and WW3 /s

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[–] Cocopanda@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!!

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[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Rakonat@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.

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[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Only a matter of time before megacorps put ads and a subscription service on bird calls, now. 😫

[–] magikmw@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago

The video is by Benn Jordan, I wholeheartedly recommend this video and entire channel. Guy is a world treasure.

[–] InvalidName2@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

While it sounds great in practice, I find it suspicious that they never mention the the final bill.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 6 points 1 week ago

not that kind of bird

[–] Hatsune_Miku@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] WindyRebel@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What if I have bird blindness and I try and teach it to a duck?

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Ducks? That’s quackery.

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[–] biofaust@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

I want this to be the next reveal in a movie or TV series, in the same fashion as the one of the Navajo "backing up" the Smoking Man's magnetic tape in The X-Files.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

?Fun? fact: In a steampunk world, birds would serve as CPUs. America experimented with using pigeons for bomb guidance. As it turned out, three birds pecking at an image had pretty good accuracy. They ultimately lost out to silicon, due to the size, maintenance, and training time.

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