Wallace the Brave by Will Henry for January 25, 2025

A few birds on the BBQ. Sterling is just trying to feed his family, maybe.

The smaller ones are more tender, but there’s less meat so you need more of them to make a real meal.

I mean, as I am just about to prepare some roast duck for lunch, I can hardly blame the lad for wanting some birds.^^

Sterling Sterling, hiding tight / In the snow mound on the right

Catch and release, Sterling!!

This is fowl.

those were the days

Joking aside, as a matter of international treaty it is unlawful to kill native North American songbirds, or to possess anything of them such as their feathers or their nests or their eggshells. Yes, even if you just found a feather on the ground. The state doesn’t really care if you pick up a random feather and keep it (provided it isn’t an eagle feather, which is a matter of some other treaties) but it’s probably best, if you’ve done so, not to boast about it everywhere.

The Feral One must be hungry.

The wise seagull is nowhere to be found.

I’m 73 and now have just learned how to spell that sound of me running through the snow!

……I am just watching!!!!

A squab squabble run afoul

Sterling needs to experience the lives of those he pursues.

He DOES eat them…….

I have no use for Sterling. Not for gags, not for stories, not for nothin’.

Serial killer in the making

I wish I had those colourful birds around my house!

My question is HOW is he hunting them.

Sterling still sees birds as competition for the bugs he missed out on last summer!

Our cats went crazy a few weeks ago. After the heavy snow fall the birds seem to have been at a disadvantage. Our cats all went wild hunting them down and bringing them in the house.

Sterling’s caused much anxietyand gained notorietyin the Audubon Societywith his gamesThey call it impietyand lack of proprietyand quite a variety of unpleasant names.

Dorothea Lange took her most famous photograph, “Migrant Mother,” like this—and note what the mother and the children ate: Lange wrote, in 1960, "I went back those twenty miles and turned off the highway at that sign, PEA-PICKERS CAMP. I was following instinct, not reason; I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon.

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

Ironically, the very next comic in my daily lineup is Shoe. Will Henry is amazingly prescient.