Bart the Mother

The episode received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised Bart's moral dilemma and soul searching moments.

As Skinner wonders how their mother ended up in Springfield, a nervous Apu secretly remembers that a pair of the lizards had come with his shipment of Bolivian donuts and escaped his store while he was putting them on the shelf.

Since the town considered the pigeons a nuisance, they are delighted and Bart is thanked and honored by Mayor Quimby with a loganberry scented candle.

Lisa worries the town will become infested by lizards but Skinner assures her they will send in Chinese needle snakes to eat them, followed by snake-eating gorillas, which will "simply freeze to death" when wintertime rolls around.

Shortly after the episode aired, Cohen teamed up with The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening to develop Futurama, where he served as executive producer and head writer for the series' entire run.

The Simpsons writer George Meyer thought the idea of Bart shooting the bird and simply nesting the eggs was too straightforward, and he did not think it had "enough of a twist" to be a good episode.

[4] For the scene in which the bird is killed, Cohen received further inspiration from an episode of The Andy Griffith Show entitled "Opie the Birdman".

[3] Then-show runner Mike Scully had done the same thing with an episode he wrote for season seven called "Marge Be Not Proud".

The species is also based on the cowbird and the cuckoo, which lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and Draco, a genus of gliding lizards.

[8] The Toronto Sun's Bruce Kirkland wrote that "Bart the Mother" was one of the "classic episodes" of the series' tenth season.

[9] The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood wrote, "We particularly like the moral dilemma at the end, as underlined by Lisa, regarding the eventual culling of the lizards that will need to take place.

"[11] Jesse Hassenger of PopMatters named the tenth season of The Simpsons the series' "first significant dip in quality, a step away from its golden era [...] with broader gags and more outlandish plots".