A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. 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. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.
Precisely… And digital modulation’s entire purpose is for a digital signal to survive those distortions bit-for-bit perfect. Even if we call the digitally-generated spectrogram digital information, the bird simply did not reproduce it exactly. Whatever time, frequency, and amplitude resolution you apply to the signal, if it’s low enough that the bird reproduced the signal exactly within that discretized scheme, then it simply did not achieve 2 MB/s. I would bet that the Shannon capacity of this bird is simply nowhere near 2 MB/s.
If your argument is that the bandwidth calculation is incorrect, then sure I think that’s fair.
But I don’t think it’s correct to say it’s not a digital channel juts because it doesn’t have optimal bandwidth.
It isn’t a digital channel because it does not reproduce digital data. Unless it’s a one-bit signal of “does this look like a bird? yes/no”, but then the human making that assessment is part of the channel. To claim this is a digital system would require us to be so reductive as to redefine the meaning of the word.
If we’re being pedantic, shouldn’t we consider that it can be a one bit signal? Otherwise you should be specific about what bandwidth you’d consider digital.