Voting Is Open To Name Three Peregrine Falcon Chicks at Cal

Among the finalists in UC Berkeley’s annual competition to name peregrine falcon chicks born atop the Campanile are noteworthy California medical pioneers, iconic state flora, some of the tallest peaks in the Bay Area, and the three spell-casting heroes of Harry Potter.

UC Berkeley crowdsourced name ideas using social media accounts set up to promote Annie and Grinnell, the peregrine falcons who made a home on the Campanile in 2016 and began raising chicks there the following year.

In April, two male chicks and one female hatched — every chirp and wing flap captured by Cal Falcon webcams, the popular live streaming video cameras trained on the falcons.

“It’s pretty much the Chick Show at the tower,” said Sean Peterson, a Berkeley Ph.D. student who runs the Cal Falcons social media project with Lynn Schofield, in a release. “Annie and Grinnell are both there and keeping their eye on the chicks, but because the chicks aggressively ask for food, even if they’ve eaten, the parents sometimes hide.”

You can vote for your favorite names until noon on Tuesday, May 19 here; the winner will be announced later in the day.

Here are more details on the names, from a university release:

• Doe, Moffitt and Koshland, after the campus libraries named for San Francisco financier and philanthropist Charles F. Doe, UC alumnus and Regent James K. Moffitt and immunologist and educator Marian Koshland.
• Poppy, Sequoia and Redwood, for the state flower, the perennial California poppy, and the two official state trees. In 1951, to settle confusion over the California Legislature’s decision in 1937 to name the native redwood as the official state tree, California’s attorney general ruled that Sequoia sempervirens (coast redwood) and Sequoiadendron giganteum (giant Sequoia) both qualified for the title.
• Ron, Harry and Hermione, good friends in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. These names received the top vote among suggestions from children.
• Hamilton, Tamalpais and Diablo, after the three main peaks that surround the Bay Area — Mount Tamalpais to the north, in Marin County; Mount Diablo to the east, in the Diablo Range in Contra Costa County; and Mount Hamilton, to the south, in the Diablo Range in Santa Clara County.
• Morgan, Scrivner and Diamond. Several of these names were suggested by multiple people, as Berkeley is celebrating the 150th anniversary of women being admitted to the university. In 1904, alumna and architect Julia Morgan became the first female licensed architect in California; Rosa Scrivner, Cal’s first female graduate, received her Bachelor of Philosophy in agriculture in 1874; and Marian Diamond, a founder of modern neuroscience and the first to show that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment. She was a Berkeley professor emerita when she died in 2017.
• Hippocrates, Edward and Florence, for the Greek physician known as the founder of medicine; Dr. Edward Jenner, founder of the field of virology and a pioneer of the smallpox vaccine; and Florence Nightingale, a nurse and social reformer who raised standards for nursing and educating nurses.