There’s a path. It doesn’t look like a remarkable one from the entrance, but it’s one my Handsome Assistant and I return to time and again. At one end, it’s nice and flat and more or less perfect for me to try to help rebuild my endurance after the flu.

The unremarkable entrance hides a number of absolutely delightful things. A large overhanging rock that’s supposedly a paleolithic shelter. Verdant fields of alien-looking skunk cabbage. Interesting-looking lichen. Giant mushrooms.

It was sunny and warm. The trees’re still skeletal, so there wasn’t much shade from the early spring sun at all. My Handsome Assistant and I joked about huddling under the rock shelter for shade. He said after all these eons, it’d probably choose that exact moment to crack in half and fall down. I chuckled. So did he. So did a tree.

“Ha ha ha!” It said, in a woman’s voice. “Ha ha!”

“The fuck,” I replied. I followed the sound as best as I could and saw a dark shape perched on a bare branch.

A crow.

And the little shit was laughing. Not just a caw that sounded like a laugh, a full-on, almost disturbingly human imitation of a laugh, in context.

This is why forests get reputations for being haunted.

It’s not my first run in with an imitating crow, either. I have one buddy who hangs around the yard and whom I have dubbed “2014 Hyundai Elantra.”
This is because his favored mode of communication is making the exact boop-boop sound of a car alarm disarming.
I don’t know why.
I don’t know what they are attempting to convey with this. But they seem to find it positively delightful, and I’m not gonna lie, I kind of love it too.

It also goes to show that birds will decide to imitate whatever they want. I accidentally ruined a friend’s Quaker parrot this way, because I have the kind of vocal tonality that small things seem to respond well to. He was acting up, so I jokingly called him a brat. On occasion when I’d see him after that, I’d greet him with a little, “Hi, Brat!” It wasn’t even that often! He had way more contact with the people he actually… you know, lived with. Nonetheless, this little bird would puff himself up very proudly, make himself tall, and proclaim, “Brat!” Then do a little head-bob dance because he was very pleased with himself. My friend tried to sort of morph it into him asking for “Bread,” but to no avail. Brat it was, and he’d be damned if he was going to change his ways.

(To be fair, he was a brat at times. I parrot sat him once and, despite being very sleepy, he refused to go back in his cage. Refused. Banging things. Throwing things. You name it. I’d take him out, and he’d snuggle up in the crook of my elbow and go right back to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat.)

All of this is to say that birds are weird as hell. You never know what they’ll latch onto… A middle aged woman’s laugh. The sound of a car’s key fob. Self-identifying as a tiny agent of chaos. Being the reason forests get reputations and aliens don’t visit us.

I love them so much.