A quick share of a recent story: creator Benn Jordan on detailed on their YouTube channel an experiment where they taught a starling the encoded waveform of a PNG image, and were then able to play it back. It’s a fascinating element in the field of ethology, (which we’ve touched on recently). Here’s the full video:
This has a lot in common with an old bit of internet lore: RFC 1149 (link), the original IP over Avian Carrier proposal, or “Carrier Pigeon Protocol”. These were originally developed as bit of a joke, using the format of the formal process for internet proposals (RFCs), but extending the protocol via looking at it as a proof-of-concept, to think about how it would actually work.
As the Wikipedia article mentions, there has been several attempts to make RFC 1149 work in the real world, to various degrees of success, but Benn Jordan’s example provides a novel approach, though with starlings instead of pigeons. (This has existed in science fiction for a while too of course, notably showing up with the fremen using bats as part of the distrans tech in Frank Herbert’s Dune from 1965.)
However, one of the issues with starlings is they lack the wayfinding capabilities of pigeons. So to effectively deliver a message, one might need to adopt a rather different approach. Enter starlings’ murmurations, the novel flocking ability where vast numbers of them shift and move through the sky in undulating waves.
A torrent of starlings, indeed.