I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN fans point to it as a fun, nerdy crossover of bird song acoustics and technology, and the story itself got its own thread.
What it is
Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec junon · 2025-12 · on “Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched”
I love Benn Jordan. If you liked this one, go check out the one where he stores a JPEG inside of a living bird. [this video]
Recommends nucleardog · 2026-03 · on “Humans 40k yrs ago developed a system of conventional signs”
I'd easily believe that bird songs are vastly more complex and interesting than we currently understand! If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy Benn Jordan's video of "saving" a PNG to a bird: [this video] (Besides the hook-y title, some interesting info on the acoustics of bird songs with some cross-over into tech.)
Cites alterom · 2025-07 · on “I saved a PNG image to a bird”
>I thought he'd transmit a PNG over a modem, get a bird to memorise that and play it back. That's essentially what he has done. Except he did the modulation/demodulation with audio software (and, technically, stored a monochrome bitmap , not a PNG). Dial-up modems encode data in audio-frequency. Later modems used phase-shift keying¹, but the very early ones used frequency-shift keying², which is essentially encoding data in a frequency graph - i.e., drawing a line in a spectrum analyzer. Drawing a bird in a spectrum analyzer is packing much more data than that; it's like playing several of those streams at once . The bird has shown itself to be capable of remembering and reproducing multiple
Cites alterom · 2025-07 · on “I saved a PNG image to a bird”
> Time to teach all local birds the AACS key :) BTW, forgot to add: the video literally suggests that when they estimate how much data can be stored in birds. The visualization of the byte sequence coming out of the Bluetooth speaker [1] (at 18:36 -18:38) starts with the oh-so-familiar 09 F9 11 02 9D ... Ben is one step ahead of you :) [1] [this video]