My skepticism barely survives this experience in one piece
Its best to ignore the Sheldrake connection momentarily, and simply listen to the bird interact. Of course, there are many 'mimic' hypothesies that can't be immediately disproved with just this data, but on an intuitive level, its very hard to dismiss this. And if there is a 'there' there, then this has very profound impact on notions of cognition in Psychology, AI, Neurobiology, Philosophy and elsewhere.
If this was unaffiliated with Sheldrake, my 'shields' would be a lot weaker.
Yeti