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‪Taking as its object a practice of birdkeeping turned towards bird singing competitions in Brazil (State of São Paulo), this article examines the theme of interspecific love passion and its implications. Based on an ethnography carried out among curiozeiros, bird breeders specialized in raising Sporophile curio (small passerines also known as curiós), and on the sites of the tournaments in which the breeders participate, it highlights the fundamental ambivalence of the practices and discourses relating to theses birds’ amorous behaviour. The article successively examines the contexts in which the curiozeiros arouse and recognize a continuity between their own feelings and those of their birds, and the situations in which, on the contrary, they draw an impervious boundary between human and animal. It thus raises the question of the elaboration and maintenance of a naturalistic ontological regime based on the separation of nature and culture. More specifically, the aim is to identify the conceptual and material devices whereby the Brazilian curió owners stabilize the specific identities made porous by their incursion into the love life of their birds. The study of the concept of instinct and its use by the curiozeiros highlights some of the strategies they use to stabilize the constantly wavering contours of the categories of human and animal. By examining the ways in which this concept is transposed into a reality experienced by the curió owners, this article intends to show the dynamic nature of an ontology that must perpetually be revised by the actors’ practices.‪