Science

The bird that became a living hard disk: it has managed to store a PNG image in its song

A scientist has demonstrated that starlings can serve as “living hard disks,” storing information and reproducing it thanks to their song.

Rubén Martínez Gabriel Huerta

Update: Aug 5th, 2025 00:54 CEST

The animal kingdom is absolutely fascinating, and we may never fully understand it. Within the world of birds, there are several species that stand out for their expertise and intelligence, such as the starling. A recent experiment has shown that a European starling has managed to store and reproduce an image in PNG format thanks to its peculiar song, which openly challenges everything we thought we knew about them.

Neither fantasy nor fiction: starlings can store and reproduce information thanks to their song.

Starlings are birds that possess an unusual ability: they can imitate the sounds they perceive in their immediate environment with astonishing precision. There are many videos on social networks in which animals of this species replicate the voices of both people and machines in a way that is as meticulous as it is disturbing. Taking advantage of this expertise, Benn Jordan, a musician and science communicator, wanted to take this attribute of the animal to the extreme.

Roughly speaking, the experiment consisted of converting an image of a bird in PNG format to sound using a wavelength synthesizer. In strictly scientific terms, it is still the same data set: if this sound is converted back to an image using the reverse process, the result will be the original illustration of the bird. Jordan played this sound near a pet European starling, who learned it by heart and was able to successfully replicate it with astonishing fidelity: this reverse process made it clear that the two images are virtually identical.

In other words, this unique study has shown that starlings do indeed have an unprecedented ability to store and reproduce information through their song, making them like little hard drives or living storage units. “This little bird has successfully learned and mimicked the sound in the same frequency range in which it heard it, effectively transmitting about 176 kilobytes of uncompressed information,” commented an astonished Jordan.

The bird that became a living hard disk: it has managed to store a PNG image in its song

The secret of starlings lies in their syrinx: a phonation apparatus that birds possess where the trachea bifurcates and which is especially developed in songbirds. Thanks to their hyper-specialized anatomy, these birds can replicate virtually any sound they set their minds to. In this respect, they surpass in versatility birds such as parrots, erroneously positioned in popular culture as the great imitators par excellence. While parrots can mimic human voices with great skill, starlings are capable of this and more: they also reproduce complex environmental sounds, such as the croaking of frogs, knocking, honking, and human chattering.

Another key aspect that has made the result obtained is the fact that the starling in question was abandoned by its parents and was rescued by Jordan, so it was raised by him and began to live with his family. Like many other animal species, these birds complete their development by learning by imitation. However, having no parents or conspecifics from which to learn to develop their natural song, instead, it began to replicate sounds of people, such as distant conversations—going so far as to imitate the reverberation—the cuddling they do to it, or the shutter of the camera of the cell phone.

So now you know: if you’re ever walking in the bush and you hear something that shouldn’t be there by pure logic, don’t hurry. You’re not going crazy, nor are you dealing with a supernatural presence; it’s perfectly possible that there’s a prankster starling nearby, or one that simply wants to get your attention.