ALTA ONLINE - When I was a kid, teaching myself to bird-watch, I would go out to the arboretum, and I found this one Anna’s hummingbird holding a territory.” Ornithologist Chris Clark’s obsession with hummingbirds like the red-crowned Anna’s began with repeated visits to the University of Washington’s arboretum, in Seattle, at the age of 14. Though he didn’t yet know that the tiny, fast-flying birds would form the basis of his professional life, he quickly became enamored with them. “I would go out every day to check on that bird.”
Fast-forward to 2019. Clark strolls across the campus at UC Riverside, where he has been a professor of biology for the past six years. The springtime sun is shining as a gentle breeze blows from the west. The predominant sound is traffic, but if you close your eyes and ignore the din of nearby I-215, you can just about hear the stits and tyuks produced by the hummingbirds as they flit among the carefully landscaped hedges and shrubs, going about their business of wooing mates and claiming territories.
“As far as hummingbirds and hummingbird biology goes, this is one of the best campuses in the world,” he says just before spotting an Allen’s hummingbird resting atop a flowering Cape honeysuckle rooted in a planter between a parking lot and the psychology building.