Annie Is a Grandparent! Four New Falcon Chicks Arrive on Alcatraz

Carrie Fisher once said, “There should be a term for what celebrity children go through, which is narcissistic deprivation. The family is organized around the parents or parent and not around the children.”

The offspring of the Bay Area’s most beloved falcon, Annie, can probably relate. All year round, Annie is showered with attention, memes and livestreams. She even has her own merch, for crying out loud! For Bay Area falcon fans, Annie’s every move — her newest love interest, her latest mid-air fight, that time she went on the lam for a week — isn’t hard to track. But what of her many, many babies?

For the most part, Annie’s 15 kids have dropped out of the public eye as soon as they’ve left the UC Berkeley campanile. Worse, we often only hear about them when tragedy strikes. Like when 2017 chick Lux died after flying into a window, or when Lindsay, one of the two 2022 babies was killed by a hawk, two months after fledging. (A lot of us still haven’t recovered from that one, especially after losing Grinnell, her father, just months before.)

There are always, of course, exceptions to the rule. These are the nepo babies, the kids who are going to outshine even their famous parents. One of Annie and Grinnell’s 2020 babies, Sequoia, has been hanging around in San Jose trying to make a name for himself. But it’s Lawrencium, one of Annie and Grinnell’s 2018 chicks, who’s really starting to follow in her mom’s famous footsteps.

Lawrencium and her boyfriend, you see, are the first peregrine falcons to ever nest on Alcatraz. They moved onto The Rock in 2020 and quickly embarked on making a sex tape. Okay, not quite, but they did fornicate on top of the water tower in front of God and everyone. (By “everyone,” I mostly mean the wonderful rangers of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area who diligently shared the news.)

This act — this one right here — produced two chicks that year.

This year, however, Lawrencium has really outdone herself. The new mom just successfully hatched all four of her eggs, producing a tiny band of fluffy-butted chicks who, thus far, are doing a great job of wobbling around their nest like a crew of drunk old men at closing time. It’s an especially impressive brood given the storms that battered the island for much of the falcons’ incubation period.

The National Park Service was kind enough to send us footage of the first two chicks, awaiting the arrival of their siblings:

Grandpa Grinnell would be so proud.

Finally, for a sneak peek of what these precious little bundles are going to look like in a month or so, here’s what one of Lawrencium’s 2022 fledglings looked like.

They grow up so fast.