I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

• The complex network of sounds around us has evolved for over 500 million years.
• Birds, particularly starlings, have unique vocal abilities and can imitate various sounds.
• Exploring the phenomenon of sound recording highlights the capability of capturing animal sounds.
• Understanding bird songs can deepen our appreciation of the natural world.
• Numerous affordable tools and methods for bird recording and identification are available.

No matter where you live on this planet, you are coexisting with an extremely complex network that has been developing and evolving 500 times longer than human beings have and three times longer than primates have. But we are also so used to them that our brains no longer pay attention to the sounds that they make. But once you actually pay attention and listen to those sounds... Holy sh.

I'm no stranger to studying how different animal species experience time slower or faster than you or I do, and how that tends to relate to the sounds that they hear and make. But birds are a whole new level of this phenomenon.

In this video, I'll be traveling to visit a very intelligent bird that spent his entire life sampling unnatural sounds, or noise pollution, or even parts of human conversations with the reverb and echo included. We'll be recording him with a special ultrasonic microphone setup which will allow ornithologists to understand more about how some species of birds can recreate virtually any sound that they hear.

I'll even show you how I got this starling to draw a picture of himself with his voice. To my knowledge, this may technically be the first time anyone has ever stored data in an animal. We’ll be analyzing all sorts of amazing and weird bird songs that I’ve collected, and I’m gonna show you how easy and inexpensive it is for you to be able to build a portable device that listens to its surroundings, records sounds, recognizes bird songs, and constantly updates a website so you can know and hear virtually every bird-related thing happening around your home.

And there’s absolutely no subscription or sign up necessary. We have so much ground to cover. So let’s dive into the hidden and extremely weird world of birds!

We humans and most mammals have lungs that push air up into the trachea, directing air up into the larynx. By precisely controlling the airflow, we can push pockets of air through the folds of our vocal cords either slowly or rapidly. Each time these folds open and close, they create a soft tap. The level of muscular control that we have over this is mind-blowing.

And if you do that 36.71 times per second, you have this. And if someone were incredibly able to do it at 3729 vocal flap taps per second, you would have this. The muscles in your mouth and throat produce things like vowels, while your tongue and the roof of your mouth produce some of the consonants.

When most of us think of talking birds, we think of parrots. Parrots are highly social and communicative birds that have evolved a tongue that helps them with speech. But they’re not merely just cloning what we do. Saying “Polly want a cracker” with a beak is a very different workflow than saying it with a human mouth.

But other birds, like songbirds, have a syrinx. This is where things get really crazy. A syrinx places two pairs of muscles on each passage coming out of the lungs, and some birds have as many as 14 of these muscles. Songbirds are on the higher end of those muscle numbers, all of which are used to control the pitch of their voice with exceptional precision and speed.

They can go from this note to that note, dozens, if not hundreds, sometimes even thousands of times per second. When the speed of this gets fast enough, we start seeing amplitude modulation and frequency modulation between the two pockets of air being pushed out of each of the lungs. You might better recognize these terms from their acronyms, AM and FM, as this is the exact same thing allowing a radio wave to transmit an audio frequency to a receiver.

Amplitude modulation involves very quickly changing the volume of my voice, whereas frequency modulation modulates the frequency of a voice. If we take this sine wave and modulate its frequency with another sine wave, we can get some really complicated sounds.

In fact, FM synthesis is very familiar to just about anybody due to its vast use in 1980s pop music. So that's how a little guy like this—who bit me a whole lot—can make sounds like this.

And when we record him with a special microphone that allows us to slow him down significantly without a reduction in audio quality, we get to hear just how insane the syrinx mechanism is. Another fun use of ultrasonic recording is hearing bats’ sonar. If we use special microphones that can hear up to 192 kHz, we can take an otherwise unnoticeable ambient recording and see this entire hidden world of sounds happening just above the microphone.

And then when we slow down the audio significantly, we can hear the sonar fields being constantly barked out by the bats scanning up.

Got a detection? Zero it in. My first order of business was to figure out what the variety of avian species looked like on my farm here. So I put out some recorders that just monitored various points of the property 24 hours a day, a bird feeder camera, and a small DIY device that records, classifies, and sorts through every single bird song that adheres and then updates a local webpage where I can keep tabs on every tweet and chirp that happens around my studio.

While that data was being collected, I decided I’d do some field recording down on a golf island in Florida where I’d unlock access to a lot of migratory and neotropical birds to expand my ultrasonic recording library. I did manage to get some decent recordings of a willet, a ruddy turnstone, a white ibis, and a little egret—which is the species name.

In my opinion, it’s a pretty big egret. Unfortunately, none of these birds really make sounds that are all that ultrasonically interesting. But on my last day, I visited the seaside seabird sanctuary, which had a whole bunch of owls, black-crowned night herons, and on the beach right behind it, I found the highlight of my whole trip to Florida—a bunch of brown pelican nests full of babies. And if you happen to do sound design for horror films, these guys will make your job a whole lot easier.

I love it when unsettling and adorable collide in the same creature. Speaking of horror sound effects, if you ever need some zombie sounds, just record laughing gulls in slow motion on your phone.

I had a lot more luck in the mountains of North Georgia as some of the more remote wildlife refuges are only accessible by off-road vehicle, which makes noise pollution a lot more scarce. There's so much quartz up here, what you got? Wow. Did you somehow take down a deer when I wasn’t looking? Cool.

There you go. I spent a few more days lugging all this gear around in other remote parts of Georgia before deciding to check on my massive bird data collection project still running back home. In my absence, the automated bird recorder and analyzer captured 31 bird species with quite a few chimney swifts and common grackles, which are quickly declining in population as they slide into the federally recognized endangered species category.

It also seems like quite a few members of the quickly dwindling red-headed woodpecker population have taken residence on my land. Neat, but soundwise, the most interesting birds I found on my property were the eastern Towhee, which sometimes uses amplitude modulation in the early swooping part of its song. And the most common bird on my property other than my chickens is the northern cardinal.

Cardinals have a really consistent repetitive frequency sweep and the males seem to show off how large of a range they have, which, by the way, is far more than a full 81 key piano. Then I have some ruby-throated hummingbirds, which is one of the hardest species to capture clear sounds of—not only due to their wing buzzing and humming, but their general skittishness.

And they seem to pretty infrequently flex their songwriting skills. Then there’s the tufted titmouse, which doesn’t really have much of a song but it created sort of a vintage camera sound that I’m very used to hearing in the background around my house. But the spectrograph really caught my eye. It seems to be creating as many as 18 pitches at once, very few of which are natural harmonics of the fundamental.

And I frankly don’t understand how. This tufted titmouse was very uninterested in being anywhere around humans. I was not able to get a decent shot with any of my cameras. But here, in all his glory, is my bird feeder camera trap's number two customer. If you’re wondering who the number one customer is, you guessed it—a squirrel and a tufted titmouse fighting over a bird feeder.

It’s like if you took away Korn's guitars and gave them chainsaws. What am I doing? Some birds can mimic, which allows them to impersonate other birds, and there are a lot of crazy reasons birds do this that vary by species. Take this male northern mockingbird, for example. He’s learned as many different songs as he can to show females not only that he’s intelligent, but that he’s managed to survive for a very long time to be able to pick up so many songs.

These complex mixtapes of songs are also beneficial for territory and defense. Other males may fly into the area and realize that they’re outmatched, preventing a physical altercation that might jeopardize either bird. Male mockingbirds and the dudes you see taking selfies at LA Fitness are basically the same organism.

On the other hand, when the little tiny brown thornbill feels threatened, she mimics the alarm calls of other bird species to create an atmosphere that larger birds might consider dangerous and worth avoiding. This would be like the little puny kid telling the bully that the cops are on the way the moment he feels threatened. A pretty good tactic.

An even more clever mimicry is from cuckoo birds, which are known for being brood parasites. Female cuckoos lay eggs in the nests of other species. Once hatched, the parasitic chicks quickly mimic the begging calls of the hosts. It is possible that the robins in my area are raising yellow-billed cuckoo chicks without realizing it.

And I think we just unintentionally figured out exactly where the term “cock” originated from. But European starlings, mostly known as a pest and a well-established invasive species here in the United States, are not only among the most skilled mimics but are easily one of the most intelligent bird species there is. Crows seem to get all the credit from us humans with their puzzle-solving skills and teamwork.

But I’d argue that our fascination with crows is not so much about their impressive intelligence, but how we anthropomorphize that intelligence. A bunch of crows working together to solve a puzzle is relatable to us. But starlings are the only species that can flock together and form murmurations, which is easily one of the most incredible phenomena in nature.

Let’s say that you’re a big scary hawk or falcon and you spot a big flock of smaller birds not far away. Sounds like a great meal. But when that flock of birds turns into a gigantic solid shape before your eyes, it not only makes it harder to single out a bird to capture, but the murmuration can actually take the form of a giant, monstrous bird itself. We have a lot more to learn about this phenomenon, but we do know that murmurations require starlings to have relatively advanced counting skills.

When a single starling notices that seven of the starlings closest to it are flying in a pattern, it will copy the pattern with a slight latency. And when their other starling neighbors on the other side notice this, with six more of their neighbors, they’ll do the same, and so on. Crows, on the other hand, can only seem to count to four.

And I’m not saying that crows aren’t smart, nor am I even arguing that starlings are smarter. I just don’t think that humans are very good at measuring the intelligence of a class of species that have been evolving for well over 150 million years before humans became a thing.

But some starlings can do something even more phenomenal to me than participating in crazy flocking: they can effectively record and replay nearly any sound that they hear. When I came across footage of Mal, which is the name of this male starling that was rescued and cared for by an artist and animal rescuer by the name of Sarah Tidwell, I needed to know more about what was going on acoustically and neurologically to give this fella such incredible abilities.

It seems like a whole lot of people, and even researchers, have wondered this about starlings without finding too many answers. So I packed up my ultrasonic recording kit and headed to Louisville to hopefully get Mal comfortable enough to show me and my microphones more about how his singing abilities work.

As a complete wild shot in the dark, I drew a photo of a bird and a spectral synthesizer and put the sound on my phone to play for the starling, on the off chance that he’d like the sound enough to add it to his vocabulary, which would effectively make himself capable of storing and transmitting image data. That was a pretty tall order, but I had to try it.

Just like most humans under the age of 10, Mal’s favorite thing seemed to be his mama's phone, and he seemingly just enjoyed the lock screen. Which seems a bit boring to you and me, but the critical fusion flicker frequency measurement or the temporal resolution of a starling isn’t exactly known. But other birds in the passerine order can detect light pattern changes above 150 Hz.

So it’d be safe to assume that a boring lock screen to you and me looks more like this to a starling. Temporal resolution is also very important when we consider a starling’s song. The higher resolution means that seconds last much longer to a starling. So imperfections in pitch and time are much more noticeable in bird time.

And this is exactly why we’re using special ultrasonic microphones in the first place, to slow things down and at least hope to understand more about this vocal phenomenon. It turns out luck was on my side because not long after I got there, this little starling got right to business and quickly showed me how intelligent and experienced he was with his incredible library of songs.

But since he was adopted as a baby and didn’t live a life in the wild, he had a completely different palette of inspiration. It seemed like his favorite sound was the older shutter sound when you take a picture or a screen grab on an iPhone. A lot of the sounds were his human family members making the types of noises you would make when adoring a little bird.

Let’s start by taking a look at his most refined sound: the camera shutter sound. And let’s slow it down by nearly nine times. Here’s the original Apple sound, and here is the starling's version. Let’s slow down the original one quite a bit, and it’s gonna sound a little wonky and dithered because obviously the original UI sound is not ultrasonic.

It’s probably lower quality for efficiency's sake. The starling emulation of that sample—wow, that is just so cool. Now, I suppose I understand how it’s happening with two tones, but now I’m even more amazed by the amount of precise control over each of those muscles in the syrinx.

Here’s a good sequence. I have a puppy here named Gary, and I show you a picture of Gary’s concern about that sound. Imagine waking up in the middle of the night and just hearing this!

If you’re listening to this on headphones, turn down the volume a notch—this whole area right here is just crazy. I played my bird drawing spectral sound a few times and I did get a sort of freeze. Like he was distracted by it and paid attention. But throughout my visit, we didn’t hear him clone it or say it.

But when I got home, going through my many gigabytes of starling sounds from this recording session, I noticed a little bird in the spectrogram. At first, I thought I was just simply seeing my phone playing the sound to the starling. But this was much later in my visit, and it was combined with another type of vocalization.

If we listen to it at half speed, then there’s this line just sort of randomly going through it. I’m assuming that maybe that's just a sort of, I don’t know, like a fundamental frequency to modulate everything else. Here’s the original file that I played for it.

Original Starling recreation: Let’s just try to isolate this little mouth part of the beak, crop it, and now we could see if it's pitch perfect. For the most part, we lost a little bit of precision in the starling song, and he was about 50-60 Hz flat. But musically, that means literally nothing up in the 4000 Hz range.

This little bird successfully learned and emulated the sound in the exact same frequency range that he heard it, effectively transferring about 176 kilobytes of uncompressed information. Hypothetically, if this were an audible file transfer protocol that used a 10 to 1 data compression ratio, that’s nearly two megabytes of information per second.

While there are a lot of caveats and limitations there, the fact that you could set up a speaker in your yard and conceivably store any amount of data in songbirds is freaking crazy. We found him on this side of the road as a baby. He was just basically one big hangry mouth. The constant traffic of this train going up and down the road caused this nest to just be in a stressful atmosphere, and that’s why he probably left the nest.

This replication of the reverb was something that people before him thought was not possible by anything that could mimic. It creeps a lot of people out when they start saying stuff in their voice. It’s literally like you’ve thrown your voice to the other side of the room and somebody’s over there murmuring in your tone. You know, it can be very unsettling.

Another amazing takeaway from my visit was Sarah and her family’s commitment to helping animals. We tried counting how many animals she was caring for just on that day alone and gave up. The amount of animals that you are caring for?

Oh gosh, eleven dogs, seven foster cats, a mama, three babies and then three solo kittens, a herd of redfoot tortoises, and then a smaller herd of juvenile redfoots. Chickens. We had a small flock. The neighborhood finds out you have chickens. Around this time of year, everyone’s store-bought tractor supply coops are starting to fail.

Her and her husband are also extremely talented artists and their Patreon and art projects help fund their immense efforts to save and enrich the lives of these animals. They make super limited edition shirts, stickers, coloring books that are all printed regionally and locally. And at the very least, you should follow Sarah on YouTube and Instagram simply to get updated on what crazy sounds Mal is making.

Nothing in this segment is paid promotion. These recommendations are from Ben’s personal experience while atop a high horse, vehemently refusing to be paid for his time. Last year, I made a video on acoustic cameras, and after a lot of experimentation, trial and error, and tweaking, I managed to make one. Not bad, right?

While I am very proud of myself and quite frankly shocked that I managed to do it, the downside is that it’s extremely fragile, it has a limited resolution, and it requires a pretty powerful laptop connected to run all of the microphones and display them over a separate webcam imager. And that makes it more or less unusable when I’m hiking into the woods trying to locate birds or bats.

The reason I went through all of that trouble to try and make an acoustic camera is because the ones that you could buy with comparable precision cost upwards of $20,000. Not long after I made the video, an industrial imaging company reached out about a product that they were designing at the time that would use a similar amount of ultrasonic MEMS microphones.

That would bring the cost down considerably, and that essentially would put all of the functionality of my DIY acoustic camera into a rugged little camera that runs and records photos and videos as a standalone device. The stuff it records can then be analyzed with their desktop software without any coding required.

Here it is, locating bats with its ultrasonic ranges or pointing out otherwise invisible cicadas. And obviously, it’s hugely helpful when trying to get video content of birds that I’m recording. Literally, while recording this monologue, I just accidentally discovered that I have an enormous amount of ultrasonic interference coming from one of my studio lights.

And I should mention that none of these examples are even related to the primary purpose of an acoustic camera, which is detecting mechanical faults or leaks in pipes or, I don’t know, figuring out who farted. This probably sounds like a sponsorship and I’m not being paid anything to show it to you.

When it’s available—which should be soon—it will cost a little bit over a thousand dollars depending on where you’re buying it. In the world of acoustic cameras and bioacoustic technology, that’s a price drop that dramatically changes the cost of entry for this type of technology.

And I feel like the dorky audio subdemographic of my viewers are already searching for it. So, it’s a Faurick TD2. Do you want to record high-quality stereo ultrasonic frequencies? Not only does it allow you to hear and see things around you that you probably never even knew existed, but if you’re involved in Foley or sound design, the ability to slow audio down dramatically while retaining good quality is a pretty awesome privilege.

A decade ago this would cost you many thousands of dollars for a decent stereo setup. But now I have some good news for you. Firstly, you’ll want any recorder or audio interface that supports 192 kHz at 32 bits. Also, if you just search around, you might see some 384 kHz audio interfaces on Amazon and Alibaba for a low price.

I highly doubt that they’re actually recording at this resolution due to the simple fact that there simply aren’t any analog to digital converter chips or libraries that can do this anywhere near the price range that they’re selling them at. Another quick thing to note before you go on some forums or Reddit looking for advice on what to buy: the discontinued Sony PCM100 has been the go-to recommendation by most field recording enthusiasts for a really long time due to its incredibly low self-noise at -127 dB.

In fact, you can even find some used ones on eBay for as much as $1,500. Nowadays, any Zoom recorder with an F series preamp has the same self-noise rating, but since they’re thirty-two bits, they have about 19 times more dynamic range.

I’ve used the F3s a lot and they run around $300. If you want to record more channels, the F6 or F8 are available and significantly more expensive, but if you find a good deal on virtually anything else that matches the specs, you probably won’t notice the difference as every modern recorder has excellent self-noise these days, with the exception of the Tascam PortaCaptures. They have a terrible self-noise up in the ultrasonic range, and they’re pricey anyway and eat up batteries, so I’d avoid them for this unless you already have one.

Ultrasonic microphones can run anywhere from dirt cheap MEMS all the way up to $10,000 specialty bioacoustic mics. A great start would be the SO4 from Sonorous Objects, a small mic company in New York. They’re super tiny, very quiet, and the Stereo Man Rep pair runs around $199.

You could also make your own microphones by picking out capsules and soldering them to preamps. It's not actually that hard, but there’s a little bit of trial and error involved—though it kind of leaves the scope of this video. But if you do not own any audio gear whatsoever, you should be able to get started recording high-quality professional scientific stereo ultrasonic recordings for around $500.

If bats are your thing, Wildlife Acoustics makes something called the Echo Meter Touch for Android devices and iPhone. It’s essentially an ultrasonic microphone and preamp bundled with software that lets you record, identify, and even listen to bats in real-time. They have two different versions, and I think the least expensive of the two is $179.

I did a whole video on this years back—link in the description. The Audio Moth has been around for quite a while and I’m really mad at myself for not finding out about it until last year. I might go as far as saying that it’s the best $100 I’ve ever spent.

It’s a portable, headless ultrasonic recorder that features both open-source hardware and software. It could record up to 24-bit 384 kHz with its onboard microphone and a pair of AA batteries keeps it recording for about 12 days.

It’s extremely customizable, allowing you to just use it as a normal recorder that you turn on and off, operate on a very particular schedule or as an ultrasonic USB microphone. There are also different variations for underwater recording or automatic GPS logging or development boards for integrating into your own recording device. The programming and recording software is free, and none of these hardware variations will cost you over $100 unless you’re aftermarket shopping or doing something very specific like adding a GPS chip to the stock development board.

You will need a micro SD card in some form of case to put this thing inside of, and that can range from anything from an old Altoids tin to a premium waterproof case with D battery enclosures. The one that I use the most is just something that I quickly whipped up in Cinema 4D and 3D printed, that I'll just strap to a tree or a fence post.

Unless you modify it somehow, the recordings are in mono and the quality is good, not great. But if you’re looking for a reliable bioacoustic recorder that you can bring anywhere, you’d be crazy not to look into this.

Birdnet Pie is something that frankly everyone should have, whether they’re biologists or gardeners or simply anybody who wants to replace some of their social media time with a constantly updated and organized information library filled with sound files created by the birds around any desired place.

It doesn’t require any signing up or personal data. You don’t have to pay for a subscription; you don’t even need to be connected to the Internet with it. It could be user-friendly enough for children to use, or you could use a terminal and compile and execute scripts to help refine the data however you want.

Basically, it’s just a really fun, low-cost, incredibly powerful bird computer. I’m going to give you a few example Birdnet Pie setups.

The cheapest would be a $30 Raspberry Pie Zero starter kit that comes with the power supply and case, combined with a very basic seven dollar USB MEMS microphone dongle. You’ll also want to get a three dollar USB cable so the microphone isn’t right up next to the CPU getting interference from it, and that totals out to be maybe $40.

If you wanted a mid-range setup with a snappier interface and a directional mic, you could get a $100 Raspberry Pi 4 kit with a $70 Movo X1 shotgun mic with an onboard preamp. That way you could just place the Raspberry Pi inside of a window and run the mic out the window under an awning and point it at an area you want to record most clearly—all that would cost about $170.

If you wanted to max everything out and just get a library of really clear recordings, you could get an $80 Raspberry Pi 5 with a $75 IP 65 rated waterproof enclosure. Then you’d need a PSU and an SD card for like $30 and then two $40 water-resistant lavalier microphones bridged into a $25 3.5 mm to USB card. This would allow you to move the lav around and monitor two different points of a location simultaneously.

You would never really have to worry about anything as long as you were running power to it, and all of that totals to about $250, which is still significantly less than what something like this would cost if it had the exact same functionality.

As an end product that required an ongoing subscription to use, Cornell Lab offers a vast selection of tools and databases that are fascinating to play with, even if you’re not that into birds. The first and most widely known and easily accessible is the Merlin Bird ID app.

You open it up, you wait for a bird to chirp, you select the sound on the real-time spectrogram, and then boom! Using machine learning and your GPS coordinates, it tells you what bird it thinks it’s recognized and virtually anything you want to know about that species.

Then there’s eBird, which is a massive goldmine of extremely detailed information about bird sightings. You want to know where a starling is near your home? Simply search it and look it up on the map. If they exist in your region, chances are someone near you has spotted one and published their findings in the last week.

Then there’s the Macaulay Library, which is an enormous community-powered collection of bird information, photographs, videos, and hundreds of thousands of sounds—with submissions spanning nearly 50 years. Cornell Lab also has free desktop bioacoustic software and plenty more to offer.

But that's just my top three to get started with. And again, all of this stuff is 100% free. I hope that this video gets some people into birding because it’s a pretty healthy, relaxing, and easy-to-get-into hobby.

I also want to again thank Sarah Tidwell and her family for letting some weirdo travel from three states away to record one of their birds. Okay, we're doing this.

Most of all, I would like to thank my Patreon members for making all of this possible. I feel like three or so years ago, my ultimate goal with this channel was to have, no idea how hard you’re making, to use YouTube revenue and Patreon to fund independent science research and make science-related educational content.

And videos like this are exactly that. I can just be super curious about something totally random, then go on a mission for a couple of months, and come back and take my viewers with me and show them what I found. That’s amazing.

I hope that I’m doing a good job at making this stuff seem accessible because it really is. Some of these sounds are just incredible to listen to. And I’m going to be organizing and uploading a whole lot of ultrasonic bird and bat and even insect recordings to Patreon, including the recordings of Mal, the world’s most famous starling.

If you want to join that community and download these and other field recordings and have access to music and a great Discord community—of course, if you want to support this channel and see more content like this—then my Patreon is as little as $1.

Thanks for watching. Keep creating!
Bye.