Authors: Deshpande, Purabi; Haukka, Anna;Rönkä, Katja;Santangeli, Andrea;Aivelo, Tuomas;Thorogood, Rose ;Lehikoinen, Aleksi;

Feeding birds is a common activity in many countries, especially during winter. Supplementary food can influence survival and reproduction, and therefore impact bird populations and communities. However, we know less about the provisioner’s perspective: this is critical to make policy decisions that benefit both birds and people. Feeding birds can enhance people’s connection to nature, but do people feed birds differently in rural and urban areas? Are people changing what and how they feed birds over time? What are the reasons for these changes? Here we investigate temporal changes in peoples’ food provisioning behaviour in Finland using information from two long-term monitoring datasets. In addition, we conducted an online survey (over 14,000 respondents) to reveal reasons for the changes that we detected. We find that due to recommendations of local governments and housing organisations in response to a perceived rat problem, food provisioning is declining in urban areas. Without such regulation, provisioning is increasing in rural areas. However, having more birds at feeding sites was a strong motivation for changing feeding habits across the board. Our results show that winter food provisioning involves complex decisions and is affected by factors beyond attracting birds.