A crow that knows approximately 40 words and has taken a particular liking to a former Pocatello woman and her family made waves in Oregon recently after it became a temporary mascot at an elementary school there last month.

The last few weeks have been quite the ride for former Pocatello woman JaNeal Shattuck, who went from being an emotional wreck over the Thanksgiving holiday to now celebrating the widespread attention the talking crow named Cosmo has received over the past week.

“I was crying my eyes out over Thanksgiving thinking that a neighbor might have shot my bird,” Shattuck said about Cosmo going missing. “You have no idea how smart this bird is, it’s beyond imagination. The day before he went missing he was sitting on the faucet and he wrapped his head around my neck and was breathing in my ear. I told him, “Cosmo, if you go outside the neighbors will shoot you and when he didn’t come back I thought for sure he was dead.”

But much to the delight of many students at Allen Dale Elementary School in Grants Pass, Oregon, Cosmo had definitely not been shot and instead took up a temporary residence at the school.

“This crow showed up at our school just out of the blue one morning,” Naomi Imel, an education assistant at Allen Dale told Oregonian reporter Lizzy Acker over the phone last week.

Cosmo 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.

The story of how Cosmo ended up at the elementary school to begin with, however, is almost as remarkable as hearing the bird tell all the students “I’m fine,” over and over again as school officials tried to corral the parrot-like bird.

Five days had passed since Shattuck and her family saw Cosmo before they headed from Williams to Pocatello for Thanksgiving on Nov. 22. Before leaving, Shattuck said a neighbor offered sympathy about the missing bird, commenting on how sad it is when a bird finds a mate and leaves their nest.

The day after Thanksgiving, Shattuck woke up and told her husband that she had a dream Cosmo was at an animal sanctuary and that he was safe. Not two hours later Shattuck received a call from the same neighbor she ran into before departing who was asking about some of the pigs at Shattuck’s farm in Oregon. While on the phone with the neighbor, Shattuck was eventually able to learn that the neighbor captured the bird and took him to a local animal sanctuary.

The sanctuary, not realizing he was habituated to humans, released him, likely in Grants Pass, Shattuck said.

“I contacted the sanctuary and was informed that they had a bird that matched the description of Cosmo, but they said it had hit its head really hard and they didn’t think he was going to live,” Shattuck said. “My daughter got there and they had to put that bird to sleep because it had neurological issues but they told her they remembered my bird and that he was not super friendly with them but they could tell something was different about him so they released him somewhere around the area.”

Shattuck sent her daughter looking for the bird to several areas of high elevation to call out for Cosmo, who typically respond to his name, but the crow never showed, she said.

Once he was out, Shattuck said, he started looking for home, causing quite the stir in Grants Pass.

“Cosmo would sit on top of Planet Fitness, talking to people who were going in,” Shattuck said. “He was looking for me.”

Shattuck posted on Facebook about the lost bird, hoping to find him.

After following a family friend in a truck Shattuck thought he recognized, Cosmo ended up at Allen Dale.

“He went to the only kid I know in Allen Dale and pecked on the window,” Shattuck said. “When he was in the school he was jumping around saying, ‘It’s OK! I’m fine!”

That was the fifth-grade classroom where Cosmo found snacks. Imel said the bird wasn’t aggressive at all and seemed to love the kids.

“It landed on some people’s heads,” she said, adding that the bird also knew a fair amount of curse words. “It was like a parrot. It was the weirdest thing.”

Still, because it was a wild animal that wouldn’t leave, the school called animal control.

“It was quite the production,” Imel said. “Animal control came out and decided it was not in their jurisdiction to catch the crow.”

Then, a wildlife officer from Oregon State Police came to the scene.

“That officer was able to feed it from his hand,” Imel said. “They didn’t want to net it because if they missed, it would remember.”

According to Imel, all the grades came out to witness the attempted capture of the talkative crow.

The crow seemed to enjoy the attention, playfully chasing kids around the track, she said.

“We thought it would fly away but it didn’t,” Imel added. “The kids were like magnets.”

Ultimately, the wildlife trooper was unable to capture the crow, who spent the night of Nov. 29 outside the school.

That night, when the kid relayed the story of the talking crow to his father, the father called Shattuck. Then the next day, the principal at Allen Dale contacted Shattuck’s daughter, who left to go collect Cosmo. She petted the bird and waited until his eyes were closed and then grabbed him.

A rescuer of animals, Shattuck considers Cosmo to be a free bird but also has a close attachment to him. Shattuck said she knows Cosmo is glad to be back in familiar territory.

Though it would make quite the story if somehow Cosmo went missing and returned again, he has yet to visit the neighbors who captured him. So for now, Cosmo the talking crow is safe and sound at home sweet home, just in time for the holidays.