In a unique blend of science and creativity, musician Benn Jordan has shown that a bird can store digital data. He converted a simple PNG drawing of a bird into an audio waveform using a special tool called a spectral synthesizer.

Instead of using a parrot, he chose a young starling, known for its advanced vocal abilities and a special voice organ called the syrinx, which can produce complex sounds.

Jordan played the “sound” of the image repeatedly to the starling, training it to remember the pattern. Later, while reviewing hours of recorded birdsong, he discovered the bird had accurately reproduced the same frequency pattern - effectively “retrieving” the stored image.

The experiment stored around 176KB of uncompressed data, and Jordan estimated that, with compression, the speed could reach 2MB per second. While this method is far from replacing hard drives, it opens up imaginative possibilities for biological data storage.

From art preservation to quirky message sharing, this unusual project shows that nature’s memory systems are more versatile than we think. The idea of using “data birds” might sound strange, but it has just taken a fascinating first step.