If you live among animals, you develop a relationship to them.

For around two years, I frequently camped in or near a field by a river near a large bird sanctuary. I once saw a bird in that field that was tall like a person. I'm guessing it was a whooping crane.

When we arrived, California had been in drought for a few years already. There was a big, angry bird that routinely perched near our usual campsite and initially watched my sons set up the tent with great suspicion. 

With peeing there regularly, the area greened up and we began seeing more insects and hearing more rodents. The bird probably began eating better and stopped being so suspicious of us and so aggressively protective of its territory. 

More birds of the same species arrived and liked reproduced. They seemingly nested in a small copse of trees nearby.

I eventually realized that the presence of the large bird is probably why the large coyote pack in the area spent little time in that corner of the field. When we camped elsewhere in the area, up to three times a night we heard the screams of dying deer as the pack took them down. We rarely heard or saw coyote activity in that corner of the field.

We eventually looked up information online and concluded it was probably a golden eagle. They absolutely can kill coyotes, which are fairly small canines, and even small deer.

My son said they typically take down larger prey with a surprise attack from behind, swooping down out of the sky and putting their talons through the back of the skull. He was genuinely concerned about potentially being seriously harmed by the bird until it decided it liked us.

Predators are intelligent. We believe it knew that it's life improved because of our presence even if it didn't know exactly how and why that worked and this is why it decided we were okay.

The bird began to guard us instead of glare at us. It would perch at the entrance to the field when we came in and move as we walked. After that, the coyotes were even less of a concern. 

Perhaps something like that is the origin of Native legends about guardian spirits called Thunderbirds.

We also noticed that the high-pitched voices of birds could be misinterpreted as women when heard solo or as a group of teenagers talking in the distance and saying things not quite understood but they could not mistaken for the deeper voices of adult men. One son suggested that old stories about a man pursuing a woman's voice and her disappearing could be stories inspired by run ins with birds. 

It's always a woman, not a man, and it's typically a story implying that some trickster god or spirit was behaving seductively or pretending to be a damsel in distress to lure the man. Perhaps birds are capable of learning that some calls will draw human interest without necessarily knowing they are being interpreted as a damsel in distress or seductress in a secluded area.

On Reddit, there was a discussion of Native legends like the Wendigo and someone said something like "Never go out into the woods because you heard your name or a baby crying." Someone else said a large cat of North America can sound like a baby crying and I've recently seen a video with a clip of animals mimicking human words.

Modern peoples mostly live in cities and for many people today interacting with pets -- mostly dogs and cats -- is the only interactions they have with animals. So most people have zero experience interacting with animals on their turf under circumstances where they are independent agents not trained from birth to defer to their human owners for survival and to human society and human expectations generally.