October 4, 1953: Snooopy vs The Yard: Another Realistic Bird

Unlike previous bits of suburban malice directed at the poor beagle, this one has the mental capacity to actually be contemptuous.

Those are some very good bird drawings, and Snoopy himself looks great in the second frame. Isn't that branch awfully low to the ground though?

September 1, 1953: BIRD

I've seen this happen to cats. Probably on YouTube. It's really kind of a plain strip though. The premise is really just "Birds can dive on things that annoy them."

It is another step along the road to Woodstock, though.

May 11, 1953: Snoopy and the realistic bird

This is only the second bird ever seen in the strip; the first was seen early on, and actually looked more like Schulz's adult bird design (which to clarify _doesn't_ look similar to Woodstock) than this one.

This is only the third non-Snoopy animal seen in the strip. (The second was a generic dog who chased a car.) The worm would be the fourth, I guess.

April 17, 1951: The bird's a solo act

No thought balloons yet, but Snoopy's dealings with a decidedly non-Woodstock bird are looking more human.  Something to notice: when Snoopy's head is facing the "camera" in three-quarters perspective, his eyes are a little closer together than in previous strips. Earlier he looked almost fish-eyed, but they've begun to migrate to the front.  Over time, all the characters' eyes would move closer together, which helped to give them a more mature appearance as the situations became more complex.

April 16, 1951: Snoopy chases bird down stairs

That bird is back, and so is the scribble of ire.

Eventually, it's either this bird or one that looks a lot like it that builds a nest on Snoopy's stomach while he lies atop his birdhouse EDIT: dammit doghouse, and it's one of the birds to be born from that nest who would become Woodstock.

Woodstock would pine, around Mother's Day every year, for his mother. Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography notes that Charles Schulz's mother was rather cruelly taken from him within a week of his going overseas to fight in World War II (her funeral was the day before he shipped out), a blow it seems he never recovered from.

But anyway, it's weird to think that the unobtainable love and affection that Woodstock sought from his absent mother all those years may be right here, in this very bird.

December 20, 1950: Don't you know, about the bird?

This rather straight-forward and pointless strip is notable for being the first appearance of a bird in Peanuts.  It looks quite different from Woodstock later on.

Woodstock originated as a hachling from a bird that built its nest on Snoopy's stomach as he lay atop his dog house.  The mother bird, if my memory holds up, looked fairly realistic, a lot like this one.