A travesty of a mockery of a sham

Readers, I need to rail this morning. San Francisco has declared the wild parrot to be its official animal and I am in a rage.

I cannot, of course, complain about a legitimate election result. I’m not one of those people.

But let’s examine, for a moment, the mechanism of this decision.

Two Chronicle columnists dreamed up the idea of asking subscribers to cast votes for their preferred new official San Francisco animal. The animals themselves did not choose to run, nor did they fill out any campaign paperwork. Instead, as far as I can tell (and there seems to be much secrecy around this), the candidates were selected by the columnists themselves, and readers narrowed down the vote-getters over time until a winner was evident.

So we need to keep in mind that it was Chronicle readers – not the city’s residents at large – who made the selection. And the fact that it was all done online eliminated the possibility of votes being cast by people with no Internet access and/or no exposure to the Chronicle. There were no in-person polling places and no mail-in ballots. People could cast multiple votes. The whole thing was skewed!

Everyone has been suspiciously tight-lipped about the data, but it appears that votes were cast by about 27,000 people (representing, by the way, only 3 percent of the city’s population).

The candidates were:

• Bison (not native, but a few transplants have lived in Golden Gate Park for years)
• Claude the albino alligator (obviously not native, but he lives at the CA Academy of Sciences)
• Corgi (seriously?)
• Coyote (not native, but they’re everywhere here, including our neighbor’s backyard)
• Dungeness crab (finally, a serious entrant)
• Goat (not native, but a bunch of ’em graze on Goat Hill to keep the weeds down)
• Great white shark
• Methuselah the Australian lungfish (another CA Academy of Sciences denizen)
• Mission blue butterfly
• Pelican
• Penguin (yet another CA Academy of Sciences resident)
• Raccoon (they do seem to throw lots of social events here)
• San Francisco garter snake
• Seagull
• Sea lion
• Wild parrot (not native)

Just one day following the closure of that informal “vote,” our city supervisors decided to make the parrot official, and a month later they approved the ordinance.

My own district supervisor, Myrna Melgar, wrote the resolution. If she thinks I’ll ever vote for her reelection, she can think again.

***

San Francisco is named after Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, so it’s fitting that we now have an official animal.

We also have an official instrument: the accordion. I wholeheartedly approve. It was imported from Italy, and at least one historian claims that it was San Francisco resident Guido Deiro who first played the instrument in this country. In June, the city’s Italian street festival closed with an entire symphony of accordions playing “That’s Amore.”

Our official flower is the dahlia. I don’t know what that is, so I have no comment. But the Dahlia Society of California boasts that “the Dahlia has reached its highest perfection in and about San Francisco, and . . . Dahlias originated in San Francisco are grown in gardens all over the world.” I guess that’s reason enough.

The city’s two official songs are “San Francisco (Open Your Golden Gate)” and “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” An addition of “If You’re Going to San Francisco” would form the perfect trifecta, but I’m not in charge of such things.

(California, by the way, has a state lichen and four official state nuts. All of those nuts, I believe, live in Palm Springs.)

***

San Francisco’s resolution designating the wild parrots as the city’s official animal says that the birds “are a unique and beloved feature of our city’s natural environment.”

I disagree.

The parrots (technically cherry-headed conures) are not a feature of our “natural” environment. Even the resolution notes that their natural habitats are Ecuador and Peru. The birds didn’t show up in San Francisco until the 1980s, and no one is quite sure how it happened, although many speculate that they escaped from a pet store. Today they fly around the Presidio, Cole Valley, North Beach, and Telegraph Hill. Whoop-de-doo.

Yes, they’re unique and somewhat beloved, I suppose, by a subset of city dwellers, although none of the native San Franciscans I know has ever waxed rhapsodic about a parrot.

And I grant that they’re beautiful. The resolution notes that they’re “known for their stunning colors and boisterous personalities.”

Ah, now it gets more clear. It’s likely that many voters chose the parrots because they felt that the birds’ personality traits somehow reflect the spirit of all San Franciscans.

And then the supervisors piled on. The resolution likens the parrots to immigrants and mentions that San Francisco is an immigrant-friendly city. It mentions that the parrots’ “diverse, colorful and aromatic diet” of fruits and berries echoes San Franciscans’ love of healthy cuisine. And it claims that the parrots “are raucous and noisy, wild and free, and travel in tightknit flocks that exhibit acts of solidarity, much like their human San Franciscan counterparts who are known for their vocal public input, fierce independence and deep love of community.”

Well, hold on. Is that how an “official animal” is chosen? I thought it had to do with the animal’s evoking a sense of place, not a sense of the residents. And I assumed the animal would actually be native to that location.

***

My top three choices were sea lions, crabs, and – in the #1 spot – seagulls.

I would have much preferred seals over sea lions, but alas, seals were not even an option. (A huge oversight.) The Pacific harbor seal is the only marine mammal that resides in San Francisco Bay year-round, and it’s darned cute with its teeny front flippers. The San Francisco Seals were a heralded minor league baseball team in the city from 1903 until 1957, including a 26-year stint at Seals Stadium in the Mission District, where the Giants played their first two seasons. All of the DiMaggio brothers were SF Seals. We never had a team called the Parrots!

Anyway, my third-place pick, the sea lions, didn’t really appear around San Francisco until 1989 – right after the big earthquake, when boat owners started moving their boats away from the docks – and a colony of them now hauls out at Pier 39. To “haul out” refers to the sea lions’ habit of resting and, shall we say, making love on a particular spot when they’re not swimming and foraging. They’re bigger than seals (up to 800 pounds!) and emit a cute but very raucous bark. They like to nap, but they also like to party. (Just like San Franciscans!)

My #2 pick is the Dungeness crab – the most delicious crab species in the world. (Apologies to my Baltimorean friends, but it’s true. Chesapeake blue crabs are scrumptious and probably make much better crab cakes, but there’s nothing sweeter than a Dungeness. No need to make it into a “cake.” All you need do is serve it with sourdough bread and a dry white wine. A perfect meal.) The crab can be found all over San Francisco Bay and is currently the official mascot of Fisherman’s Wharf. And a Crazy Crab’z sandwich on sourdough is the best thing you can eat at a Giants game.

But my top choice for official animal is hands-down the seagull – technically, the Western gull. This town is surrounded on three sides by ocean, and seagulls are ubiquitous here. They patrol the skies and stroll the shores, never straying far from the sea. They’re zealously loyal to their territory, and they mate for life. They obviously love baseball because they circle above Giants games starting in about the 8^th inning (waiting to scarf up garlic fries). And their cries, calls, and squawks are everywhere, providing a constant and restorative natural soundtrack to life in the City.

On many a late afternoon I sit out in my backyard with a good book, watching the gulls fly overhead and listening to their caws echoing through the eucalyptus trees. It’s a lonely but comforting sound, always letting me know that the sea is near and that I’m home.

***

Shouldn’t a representative animal have a robust connection to the city that both residents and visitors can immediately identify?

If people all over the world were asked what animal reminded them of San Francisco, they would likely talk about something that reminded them of the Pacific Ocean – the edge of the continent, where San Francisco perches as guardian.

I guarantee you that they would never answer “parrots.”

Katherine Ets-Hokin, an archivist at the San Francisco Library’s History Center, recently was asked what her preferred official San Francisco animal would be. “Seagulls,” she responded. I rest my case.

***

Due to popular demand, I am including, at the end of each blog post, the latest random diary entries that I’ve been posting on Facebook for “Throwback Thursday.” These are all taken absolutely verbatim from the lengthy diaries I kept between 1970 and 1987.

February 10, 1975 [age 19]:

“I took [my sister] Janine down to the public library today where I found two great books on the Beat Generation. I swear I am insanely infatuated with that period of American literature. I want to gobble up all of Jack Kerouac’s books and Gregory Corso’s poems. Hah, I was even considering writing a paper/doing a project on those 50s beatniks just for my own satisfaction even though I’m not even going to school this year! I want to write like them and I showed two of my typewritten, alcohol-influenced works to Kathy Giammona [a high school English teacher]. They were the long epic letter I had written to Jeanne and the exuberant piece I’d typed about San Francisco. She read them and looked up and said, ‘O, but you are a romantic, aren’t you?’ and I answered oh, yes, terribly.”

March 7, 1975 [age 19]:

“I’ve been waiting for this weekend for so long – three days in San Francisco at the conference for SB90 [the statewide educational program that was funding my service as a high school instructional aide]. I’m sharing a room with [teacher] Julie on the 5^th floor of the Handlery Hotel. I just can’t contain my excitement! A hotel in San Francisco! I took a picture of a place across the street called Bardelli’s, and at night the neon glows in the rain and reflects on the wet streets. Our hotel is so luxurious. It has two big double beds, coffee, a TV where you can order movies, and an automatic shoe polisher!”

March 8, 1975 [age 19]:

“We’re supposed to be attending the [work] conference this weekend but it’s really dull and we’ve mostly just been bumming all around San Francisco. Our group took a picture near the hotel at a place that said ‘Girls Girls Girls’ on the outside. I hope the photo comes out because Mr. Jaffa is so cute! I swear, the classes at this conference are so disorganized and boring. I wonder if this is how the working world is going to be? I just sit in the back and doodle.”

March 12, 1975 [age 19]:

“I’ve started going to the allergy doctor this week: old Dr. Egbert, mad scientist with big wild eyes and hair sticking out in all directions. Between Monday and today I had a total of 95 skin tests; my arms look like a junkie’s – red railroad tracks covering my inner forearms. They take a thick metal sharp instrument and make ¼” long scratches in rows of ten, then place droplets of serum on them and for 20 minutes you sit there in great itching distress.”