If you’re a pigeon in the Chelsea area of New York City (because so many pigeons read this blog, right?), don’t trust the guy with a box who throws bread crumbs to you in Abingdon Square!

While I was sitting on a park bench with My Darling B Wednesday morning, a man passed by us carrying a cardboard box and several plastic bags. He went round the corner to sit at an empty bench not twenty feet from us, set the cardboard box beside him on the bench and began digging around in one of the plastic bags.

“There aren’t any signs in this park asking people not to feed the pigeons,” B remarked, referring to a sign we saw in Central Park the day before, a sign that virtually everyone there was ignoring.

Just as she finished saying that, the man stood up from his bench and began scattering bread crumbs on the ground around his feet. Pigeons flew from as far as a block away to gather in a busy, fluttering knot around him, pecking at the crumbs. While we watched him feed the birds he looked over at us, smiled, and pointed down at them while he said something, but we couldn’t make out his words over the noise of so many beating wings and busily pecking beaks.

Eventually, he took a seat on the bench as he continued to scatter crumbs across the ground around him. Then he paused, I presumed because he’d thrown out so many crumbs that the pigeons were crawling over each other trying to pick it all up, but no: He suddenly lunged forward, reaching into the teeming throng with his hands. The whole mass of them to exploded into flight all at once. When the air cleared, the guy was standing with his hands straight out in front of him, holding a pigeon which he quickly shoved through the flaps of the cardboard box beside him.

Smiling at us again to take his leave, he packed up his things, grabbed the box and sauntered off. Looked like someone had a dinner of squab planned for that night.