San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
16 entrants vie to be king of our concrete jungle
San Francisco’s politicians have made plenty of flubs over the decades, but this is truly one for the birds.
We’re a city named for St. Francis, the patron saint of animals. We’re a city that notoriously boasts more dogs than children. We’re a city teeming with cool native species and offbeat transplants. And yet, City Hall has never declared an official animal of San Francisco.
Considering the city’s humans aren’t exactly doing a bang-up job these days, Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub and I think it’s time to turn our attention to our more majestic, less talkative counterparts.
Each Friday in March, our “Total SF” podcast will feature a different local animal, starting with Claude, the famed albino alligator at the California Academy of Sciences. We’re also running a March Madness-esque tournament, animal style, to allow Chronicle readers and podcast listeners to winnow a field of 16 creatures and pick their ultimate favorite. Check sfchronicle.com/animalmonth next week for the full unveiling of the 16 animals in contention and the first round of voting.
When the voting has wrapped up, we’ll seek to get your favorite — the albino alligator, the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, the bison of Golden Gate Park or some other beautiful beast — named the official animal of San Francisco. Sure, there are far bigger fish to fry for our leaders, but this city has always made room for the off-beat and whimsical. And we could use a little diversion these days.
Plus, San Francisco has wisely never been shy about celebrating that which makes it great.
We have an official bird: the California quail, which doesn’t even live in San Francisco anymore. We have an official flower: the dahlia. We have an official Christmas tree: the Monterey Cypress outside McLaren Lodge in Golden Gate Park. We have official colors: black and gold. We have an official band: The San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band (which everybody thought was the city’s official band for years before Mayor London Breed signed legislation declaring it so in 2018).
We even have two official songs: “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and, simply, “San Francisco.” But no official animal? I doggedly researched the subject to make sure.
I checked with Ellen Schumer, City Hall’s historian and a fourth-generation San Franciscan who knows everything there is to know about our city.
“I’ve never heard anyone refer to an official animal of San Francisco,” she said, noting the phoenix is on our city flag, but it’s a mythological creature, not a real one. So what’s her pick?
“If you say dog, then the cat people are going to get all upset,” she mused. “I happen to love zebras.”
I also checked with Katherine Ets-Hokin, an archivist at the San Francisco Public Library’s History Center.
“I haven’t found any evi
dence or mention of an official animal,” she explained in an email. “I’ve conferred with my colleagues and searched our records, but found nothing … I have not found a single document that codifies this information.”
That seemed good enough for me, but she asked if I had follow-up questions. I had just one: What does she think should be the city’s official animal? “Seagulls,” she replied.
The library’s spokesperson, Kate Patterson, who was copied on our exchange, shot back, “Ewww gross! I say the majestic and enigmatic coyote.”
Whatever readers pick — gross seagulls, enigmatic coyotes or something else — it would need approval from the Board of Supervisors and mayor to be made official. Supervisor Myrna Melgar said the idea sounds purr-fect to her, and she’s up for taking the matter under her wing and introducing legislation to make The Chronicle’s choice the official animal of San Francisco.
“Absolutely!” she told me.
But first, she had a couple of questions: “Has John Arntz approved this methodology?” she teased, referring to the city’s elections chief, who requires much more due diligence than an online poll. “And does this mean my nomination gets more weight?” Um, no. Her choice is the dog in honor of Frankie, the 5-year-old Lhasa apso she rescued from Animal Care and Control when he was six months old.
“He’s kind of a terror, but I love him so much,” she said. Kind of like San Francisco itself.
Melgar’s District 7Seven includes the California Academy of Sciences, making Claude the albino alligator her constituent. Hartlaub and I visited the 27-year-old, 278-pound behemoth the other day to ensure he’s holding up alright as the pandemic eases.
It’s sometimes hard to tell since he doesn’t move much, spawning a conspiracy theory academy biologists say they hear regularly that he’s actually an alligator robot. But rest assured, he’s very much alive, and we saw him snap up rats and trout heads for breakfast. Claude was hatched at an alligator ranch in Louisiana and grew up on the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in Florida. Albino alligators, which lack pigment and eyesight, can’t usually survive long in the wild, but can live to be up to 80 under human care.
The Academy of Sciences acquired him in 2008, and an exotic animal handler drove him to San Francisco in a truck. Claude has since become so famous, he’s the subject of a popular children’s book and receives fan mail from kids around the country, sometimes addressed simply to “Claude.”
He’s so well known, in fact, that when his swamp-mate, Bonnie, bit his right toe back in 2009 in a tussle over their shared heated rock, The Chronicle’s esteemed science editor, the late David Perlman, wrote a series of stories about the chomp. (The academy’s veterinarian amputated Claude’s toe, and Bonnie suffered an even more distressing fate: She was sent back to Florida.)
Now, Claude lives peacefully with three turtles: Donatello, Rafael and, no, not Michelangelo or Leonardo, the remaining Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The third turtle is Morla, apparently named for a giant turtle in “The Neverending Story.”
Emma Kocina, a biologist who cares for Claude and runs the academy’s swamp team, argued Claude should be named the city’s official animal.
“He has his own Wikipedia page,” she said. “You can buy a four-foot long stuffed animal of him. That’s pretty iconic. And he’s also on T-shirts.”
In short, Claude is a very, very big deal. But is he the biggest deal in San Francisco’s bountiful animal kingdom? He’s got a lot of rivals for the title, and we need your help to pick the top dog.