You’ve had a white crested laughing thrush talk? Thank you for the warning because that probably would have been fairly startling if mine started taking
YES. It was one of the strangest moments of my life. For those of you who don’t know, this is what a White-Crested Laughingthrush looks like:
It’s a cool little songbird that makes a loud call like a “laugh” sometimes, but still sounds distinctively like a bird. They aren’t like crows, ravens, or mynas which are known for being able to mimic.
One day I was in an exhibit that housed about a dozen birds including two White-Crested Laughingthrushes, a male and a female. I went to pick up a metal food dish and when I looked up, the male hopped down from a branch, landed right in front of me and goes,
“Hello!”
*CLANG* I dropped the damn food pan and suddenly questioned my entire existence because this little cardinal wannabe just said hello to me like it was the most normal thing in the world. None of my coworkers believed me until a few weeks later when he finally talked in front of my boss.
He only ever said hello, and it was weird because none of us remembered saying hello to the birds in that exhibit, at least not on a regular enough basis for them to start mimicking it. He probably just picked it up from random zoo visitors.
The Carving Witch 