At Allen Dale Elementary, in Grant's Pass, Oregon a friendly crow with a foul mouth mysteriously appeared. The crow helped itself to snacks, poked people in the head, and generally seemed charming.
"This crow showed up at our school just out of the blue one morning," said Naomi Imel, an education assistant at Allen Dale, over the phone on Thursday.
It began looking into classrooms, Imel said, and pecking on doors. At one point, it made its way into a fifth-grade classroom where it "helped itself to some snacks," she said.
Imel said the bird wasn't aggressive at all and seemed to love the kids.
"It landed on some people's heads," she said.
And, she added, it spoke. The bird could say, "What's up?" and "I'm fine" and "a lot of swear words."
"It was like a parrot," Imel said. "It was the weirdest thing."
Still, because it was a wild animal that wouldn't leave, the school called animal control.
After animal control was called in, and a trooper spent the night working to capture the bird, it was learned the crow is a local pet named Cosmo.
"He knows a lot of words, I'm not going to lie," said Daphnie Colpron on Thursday. "His vocabulary has expanded quite a bit in the last few weeks."
Colpron knows a good deal about the crow, or possibly raven — who also may be female — because her mother rescued the bird about two years ago when it was a baby, bringing it home to the family's farm in Williams from a shelter and naming it "Cosmo."
The family has dogs, including a mastiff named "Tonka Truck," Colpron said.
"Cosmo will say, 'Tonka, you come outside,' or he'll say, 'Dogs out,'" she said.
"Sometimes he does use profanity," Colpron added.
Colpron's mom, JaNeal Shattuck, considers Cosmo part of the family.
In the mornings, she said, "He will go right to my bedroom window and say, 'Mom wake up, wake up!'"
