A Latvian magazine has enabled real birds to tweet on Twitter thanks to a system involving a pork fat keyboard rigged up to the microblogging platform.

Birds on Twitter is the brainchild of Voldemars Dudum, a writer at Latvian weekly magazine Ir. He has set up a keyboard with pieces of unsalted bacon fat screwed onto each of the keys. The keyboard is placed in front of a webcam in the village of Sarnate on the west coast of Latvia, where temperatures can plummet to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

The birds are attracted to the bacon fat — which provides them with plenty of energy in the cold weather — and land on the keyboard to peck at the keys. The screws serve to add weight to each of the keys to ensure that the light birds can provide enough pressure to depress them.

A webcam has also been rigged up in front of the keyboard to allow budding ornithologists to watch the birds — mostly tomtits — simultaneously munch and type. So far the birds have produced literary gold, such as “cc bb c,” “mmmm … ” and the more existential text-speak, “y.”

Dudum said, “Yes, one may say it is quite silly, but if you look at what people sometimes say on Twitter, then the tomtits’ messages are still OK.”

Unfortunately, it looks like the weather is now warm enough that the birds can catch their regular bug prey, so the project is on hold until the end of the year. But you can check out the birds’ past tweets at @hungry_birds or watch a video of the birds in action above.