Herre de Bondt is a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Roehampton. He works within the Wellcome Trust-funded Animal Feeding Project, for which he conducts ethnographic research on bird feeding practices. The bird feeding industry in the UK is immense, but what motivates people to feed these creatures? How do people differentiate between species that should be fed and species that are less deserving of our care? And what do bird-feeding practices reveal about ourselves as humans?

Herre answers these questions through three case studies: General garden bird feeding in London's private residential gardens, public urban feeding of pigeons, and supplementary provisioning of the reintroduced red kite (Milvus milvus) in Reading. Combining these cases sheds light on urban human-animal relations and how to reconfigure these in times of global ecological crises.