Vote over at TWC and you can see what Elias's overeagerness results in lol

I've put multiple Simpsons references into this comic over the years, but this one might be the most obscure...if only because we don't acknowledge that anything after season 11 exists, and the Screamapiller episode was season 13. 

Weirdly enough, I've started seeing Ginger as a strange hybrid between Vincent and Malaya's personalities lol. She's unsure of herself and still freaked out by the werewolf thing like Malaya, but she's quiet and a little deadpan like Vincent. I think some of that comes from being Connie's favorite for so many years: she realized early on that doing whatever Connie wanted was the path of least resistance, and not saying a lot was easier than setting off Connie's anger. (Where as Harvey and Marcus mostly avoided Connie like the plague the whole time, because neither of them are interested in placating her.)

Anyway, here's your biology lesson! Note, the cowbird videos I saw usually showed them straight up stabbing the eggs with their beaks and tossing them out of the nests, but that's harder to draw in one panel, so this cowbird is a bit more dexterous. They also tend to stab other eggs in the nests so they don't develop, leaving just the cowbird egg behind. Some birds have developed ways of dealing with the cowbird's infiltration, like laying their eggs in a certain pattern to make it clear there's a new egg in town. I guess the Kirtland's Warbler just hasn't adapted yet. (And the cowbird eggs are speckled, which I forgot to add to my drawing, but they don't really blend in with the warbler eggs at all...) Ironically, some of the issues the Kirtland's Warbler faces with not having enough young jack pines to nest under is due to fire control. Jack pines only release their pine cones when there's been a forest fire, and with fewer fires, there are fewer young trees. The conservation efforts for the Kirtland's Warbler also involves planting a lot of young pine trees :). 

A biology lesson? In my werewolf comic??? Trust, there are multiple ways I plan to tie this whole "parasitic life form kicking out the current inhabitant and stealing their resources" theme into the future story. It...actually already fit really well lol. (Also I just like birds, and I didn't realize how well the Kirtland's Warbler's situation would fit initially!)

ETA: this is a female brown-headed cowbird! The males are mostly dark brown/black with a brown head. Thus the name. The females are just...brown all over.