Starting as tradition, the hummingbird feeders by the Lecture Hall building give a safe space for students and nature to interact. The feeders sit humbly as many species of hummingbirds come and go, leading some to wonder how they came to be on campus. Professor Bobby Goodman answers these questions and explains why we still keep the hummingbird feeders around.
Q: My first set of questions is about the hummingbird feeders. How long have you had those up there?
A: A long time. 15 years maybe?
Q: Did it become a tradition or did it become part of an experiment?
A: It’s just part of a tradition. I mean at my house, I used to have a bunch of hummingbird feeders and plants to attract them and here, being at school, I think it’s a great place for students to come and sit and relax and have wildlife around them.
Q: Do you think having wildlife around you changes the way you interact with the sciences?
A: I think giving people the opportunity to interact with wildlife as opposed to constantly being scared by TV’s new coverage of mountain lions or rattlesnakes or bears and all this other stuff. There’s lots of wildlife out there that are harmless and an enjoyment to watch. At one time at my house, I had eight feeders and as many as 60 plus hummingbirds.
Q: How’s that milkweed doing? Can you tell me about the milkweed out there?
A: Yeah, so the milkweed is not a native milkweed. It’s called tropical milkweed, and it just grows easier than our native milkweeds and the monarchs love it and that’s why we have a lot of monarchs around here, its obviously to attract a different type of wildlife, to have butterflies flying around, but with the milkweed, you have to kind of cut it back every year. There are parasites who attack the caterpillars, little flies, parasitic flies. There’s also a protozoan that monarchs will relocate to these tropical milkweeds, so you got to cut them back so they get new growth, so there are no parasites. And then as long as you’re maintaining it, then it’s pretty healthy. Not only that, you want to cut them back every winter, so the monarchs don’t hang around. They head south to Mexico or along the coast. As they’re flying north, they don’t fly all the way north. They go through and lay eggs and die. The new ones come up, fly north, lay eggs and die.They keep flying in, and it’s just kind of innate in their mind where to go. And then, regarding the other insects, you have ladybugs here. Its an invasive species.
Q: Can you tell me more about that?
A: Well, I’m not familiar with the invasive species, but we do have lots of invasive predators, intentionally released predator-type insects to control the pest insects. So ladybird beetles is their true name, but we just call them ladybugs. Ladybird beetles are notorious eaters. They just chomp away. They eat the aphids like it’s going out of style. They lay their eggs, and the larvae are eating machines as well.
Q: Does that harm any of the other cycles you have on campus?
A: Not that I’m aware of.
Q. And then tell me a little bit about the garden, just when it started approximately.
A: So the garden, Peter Cross, who teaches the bio for majors, has a bee project that a lot of the community colleges are doing around the state. And so I wanted the garden to plant avocados, papayas, and fruits that we could just give away. But I gave him permission to do half of that garden to plant California natives to attract California native bees. So the stuff that’s on the north side are the papayas, mostly. And I started those from seeds just to see if we can grow them, and a couple of them are just producing. I got some papayas already, but in a year already this big.
Q: Out of curiosity, are the papaya seeds grown from a papaya separately, or seeds you got from a supermarket? Where were the seeds found from?
A:I took them from a papaya that I purchased. A student brought me a papaya, and it’s known to grow in Brazil, but his mom has one growing in his backyard. So I currently have 20 seeds started in the greenhouse, and we’ll probably put a few of those over there and see if we can grow these big old giant papayas.
Q: Is each one of those a plant, or do you have to put them in clumps?
A: Each one is a plant. Papayas are funny because they have male plants, they only produce pollen, and they have female plants who only have the ovum to be fertilized, and then sometimes papaya plants are hermaphrodites. So what you want is the hermaphrodite, so you don’t have to worry about having a male plant present because they self-fertilize. Or you need a female with at least a male, or you can have several females with a male, or you can have females with the hermaphrodites, and you’re going to get papayas. The problem is looking at the seeds, you can’t tell which ones are males and which ones are females and which ones are hermaphrodites, so you’ve got to plant a bunch of them, grow them to where you start to see the flowers, and then determine, oh, this is a male, this is a female, this is a hermaphrodite.
Q: My own curiosity, what’s the percentage between all those? Like 30%?
A: That’s beyond my pay grade, man. I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve ever tried to grow papayas. Because I have a green thumb. I mean, at my house, I grow corn and tomatoes and pumpkins and zucchini. I just know I have a whole bunch of stuff. I had a plant, I had a pot, and it was like an ivy sort of plant. It wasn’t ivy, but it liked to vine out, and it would vine across the cord, and we had it growing from the pot 10 feet out into the roof, and my parents made me cut it.
Q: Are you only growing papayas?
A: As of right now, yes.
Do you want to know the different species of hummingbirds?
Q: There are more?
A: Yeah. There’s Anna’s hummingbird. These are all the hummingbirds that we typically see here: Anna’s and Alan’s hummingbirds are the most common ones. Anna’s are the ones with the red, magenta, gorget, chin, and head. The Alan’s are the ones with the orange, right? They’re mostly orange on the back and a little bit of green. So they’re a little bit browner, tinted. Well, the drab ones are the females, or juveniles. So the males really stand out. Those are the easier ones to tell. Pretty soon, here we’re going to have black-chinned hummingbirds. Now they call them black-chinned because when you look at them, they’re black, but when the sun hits it, it’s purple. It’s gorgeous, right? And so we have Anna’s, Alan’s, and black-chinned, But I have seen in the past Rufus hummingbirds, who migrate up all the way to Canada, and Costa’s hummingbirds. Costa hummingbirds are typically in the desert, but they’ve been showing up inland a little ways, and they’re gorgeous. They have a gorget that is purple, and it’s got these phalanges on it.
Visit these feeders between the Lecture Hall (LH) and Life Science (LS), as well as occasionally outside Hayden Memorial Library.
