AKA Hiding Your Data Inside Other People Like a Steganographic Baller
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
Jul 2025, Tom's Hardware
What
Again - 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. ... Young songbirds learn their calls by imitation, so could potentially be viewed as ‘blank canvases’ for archiving sounds. This special starling, reared by humans, has been even more receptive to reproducing ‘alien’ audio waveforms - like camera shutters and distant human speech with reverb effects.
On Steganography:
Steganographia is a book on steganography, written in c. 1499 by the German Benedictine abbot and polymath Johannes Trithemius. It was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609 and removed in 1900. It appears to be about magic — specifically, about using spirits to communicate over long distances. However, since the publication of a decryption key to the first two volumes in 1606, they were discovered to be actually concerned with cryptography and steganography. Until 1996, the third volume was widely believed to be solely about magic, but the "magical" formulas have now been shown to be covertexts for yet more material on cryptography.
And On Shady Business Practices:
Printer tracking dots, aka printer steganography or secret dots - a digital watermark which many color laser printers and photocopiers produce on every printed page that identifies the specific device that was used to print the document. Developed by Xerox and Canon in the mid-1980s, the existence of these tracking codes became public only in 2004. ... The public first became aware of the tracking scheme in October 2004, when Dutch authorities used it to track counterfeiters who had used a Canon color laser printer. In November 2004, PC World reported the machine identification code had been used for decades in some printers, allowing law enforcement to identify and track counterfeiters. ... The EFF stated in 2015 that the documents that they previously received through a Freedom of Information Act request suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
Post Script, Back to Birds:
Birdsong patterns appear to follow Zipf's law of abbreviation—just like human speech
Aug 2025, phys.org
Not much of a surprise, but nice to see in the wild.
ZLA - Zipf's law of abbreviation, a derivative of Zipf's law, where more frequently used sounds tend to be shorter
via University of Manchester: R. Tucker Gilman et al, Does Zipf's law of abbreviation shape birdsong?, PLOS Computational Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013228
For those interested in other laws metaphysical:
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